RE: "Risky" Situations

( tgee@ccs.carleton.ca )
Fri, 13 Oct 95 9:24:23 EDT

Lindsay Oades sez:
>
> I am thinking firstly of asking young
> people about their definitions of risk (and its alternative) combined with
> laddering and pyramiding. Following this I intend to ask them to choose some
> drawings I will have of "risky" situations. I am currently deciding
> whether to
> fix some situations, which they must rate, and/or leave choice open
> with other

Thinking of what your average non-PCP committee member may want, some
combination of provided and personal items seems appropriate. As I
suggested earlier, defining a domain and generating items is one way
of doing the 'provided' part. Another way is to have a set of
situations that they can do paired comparisons on. Obtain a
similarity matrix and do some ALSCAL to get at their individual
spaces. There may be more or less contradiction among different
people, giving them different 'weirdness coefficients' (weirdness in a
purely statistical sense, of course). *This* may well be related to
the degree of order in their construct systems as shown by a grid that
uses personally-generated situations from their own experience. In
fact, I'd be surprised if there *wasn't* a relationship. Showing a
mapping between personally- and researcher-provided patterns across an
older "conservative" technique and a grid would be a coup for PCP!

> Both asking for a definition and giving some choice seems
> important, so not to impose my construct of risk.

What's wrong with the question "to what extent does this group agree
with my construct system for risky things?" ? Your examples
<snipped> seem pretty good, although a couple of focus groups wouldn't
hurt in refining them.

cheers,

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
Travis Gee () tgee@superior.carleton.ca ()
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"In science, the more we know the more extensive the
contact with nescience." -Spencer

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