Parental Risk Perception: Influence of Disease Perceived Controllability, Experience and Severity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Optimistic health bias is widespread in adults, impacting responsiveness to information regarding health risks. Comparatively little is known about parents’ perception of their child’s likelihood of developing disease, despite the frequency with which parents make decisions about their child’s health. We hypothesized that parental optimism about their child’s likelihood of developing disease would be greater for diseases perceived as more controllable and those with which parents do not have experience. Parents of children <18 years complete an online survey. Primary outcome was participants’ perceived comparative likelihood of their child developing appendicitis, dental caries, head lice, leukemia, food allergies, pneumonia, asthma and obesity. Optimism was defined as the belief that one’s child was less likely than average to develop a given disease. Logistic regression models were used to examine the relationship between parental optimism and four independent variables: perceived disease controllability; knowing someone with the disease; child’s history of the disease; perceived disease severity. Among 374 participants, the proportion of optimistic parents ranged from 35.3% (appendicitis) to 65.0% (obesity). Perceived controllability increased the odds of parental optimism (adjusted odds ratio [ aOR] range: 1.57 for asthma to 4.48 for head lice). Odds of optimism were lower if participants knew somebody with the disease (aOR range: 0.42 for head lice to 0.81 for leukemia) or if the child had a history of the disease (aOR range: 0.27 for dental caries to 0.47 for head lice). These findings are important to enhance parental counseling effectiveness regarding child health behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".