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Abstract
This research locates a series of risks or hazards within a framework characterised by the level of
control respondents believe they have over the risks, and the level of worry the risks prompt. It
does this for a set of both food and non-food risks. The means by which this is done is novel, and
differs from past risk perception analyses in that it questions people directly regarding their
relative assessments of the levels of control and worry over the risks presented. The cognitive
burden associated with people ranking and scaling items in large sets is notoriously heavy, so
this study uses an elicitation method designed to make the process intuitive and cognitively
manageable for respondents.
The substantive analysis of the risk perceptions has four main foci concerning the relative
assessment of (i) novel as opposed to more familiar risks (e.g. swine flu vs. heart attack), (ii)
food risks as opposed to non-food risks, (iii) perceived levels of control over the risks versus
how worrying the risks are considered to be, (iv) differences in the risk perceptions across social
groups, as in this paper we analyse the relative assessments of farmers and consumers with a
particular orientation on E. coli.