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Accounting for Variation in the Explanatory Power of the Psychometric Paradigm: The Effects of Aggregation and Focus 

Authors: Nicolaacutes C. Bronfman a;  Luis Abdoacuten Cifuentes b;  Michael L. deKay c; Henry H. Willis d
Affiliations:   a Departamento de Ciencias de la Ingenieriacutea, Universidad Nacional Andreacutes Bello, Santiago, Chile
b Departamento de Ingenieriacutea Industrial y de Sistemas, P. Universidad Catoacutelica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
c Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
d RAND Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
DOI: 10.1080/13669870701315872
Publication Frequency: 8 issues per year
Published in: journal Journal of Risk Research, Volume 10, Issue 4 June 2007 , pages 527 - 554
Subject: Risk Management;
Formats available: HTML (English) : PDF (English)
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Abstract

Most psychometric studies of risk perception have used data that have been averaged over participants prior to analysis. Such aggregation obscures variation among participants and inflates the magnitude of relationships between psychometric dimensions and dependent variables such as overall riskiness. However, most studies that have not averaged data over participants have also shifted the focus of analysis from differences among hazards to differences among participants. Hence, it is unclear whether observed reductions in the explanatory power of psychometric dimensions result from the change in the level of analysis or from the change in the focus of analysis. Following Willis et al.'s (2005) analysis of ecological risk perceptions, we unconfound these two variables in a study of risk perceptions in Santiago, Chile, although we use more traditional hazards, attributes, and statistical procedures. Results confirm that psychometric dimensions explain less variation in judgments of riskiness and acceptability at the disaggregate level than at the aggregate level. However, they also explain less variation when the focus of analysis is differences among participants rather than differences among hazards. These two effects appear to be similar in magnitude. A simple hybrid analysis economically represents variation among participants' judgments of hazards' riskiness by relating those judgments to a common set of psychometric dimensions from a traditional aggregate-level analysis.
Keywords: Risk perception; psychometric paradigm; principal component analysis; level of analysis; aggregation
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