1 Safety Risk
- Freedom from unacceptable risk; Combination of the probability of
occurrence of harm and the severity of that harm.
5.1.2 Risk
- Any uncertainty about the future.
exponentially with exposure, or there may be a safe limit below which the death
rates are unaffected by exposure. To evaluate the degree of impact of a hazard
both risk and exposure levels must be taken into account.
In contrast to the early statistical assessment of risk, the intrinsic psychosocial
nature of risk acceptability was initially studied through psychophysics and
psychometrics of risk perception (Slovic et al., 1990; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974).
There were two main ideas that emerged at about the same time, first risk was
recognized as a social construct and secondly that implicit theories of risk
perception have developed among laypeople that describe how risks are evaluated,
accepted and how personal decisions concerning different risks occur. (Heimer,
1988; Lupton, 1999ab). Thus, risk acceptability was determined to be a measure of
an individuals tolerance for risk derived from a social construct influenced by a
number of acquired factors.
Risk perception is the subjective judgment people make about the severity
and/or probability of a risk, and may vary person to person. Any human endeavor
carries some risk, but some are much riskier than others.