Demographic determinants of incident experience and risk perception : do high-risk groups accurately perceive themselves as high-risk?

摘要

This paper analyses demographic determinants of incident experience and perception of risks, as well as the relationship between the two, for eight different risk domains. Analyses are conducted by merging the results of a Swedish population-based survey, which includes approximately 15 000 individuals, with demographic and economic register data. Being male is associated with higher incident experience yet a lower risk perception for nearly all risk domains. Lower socioeconomic status is associated with high incident experience for violence and falling accidents, but lower incident experience for road traffic accidents. For risk perception, lower socioeconomic status is associated with higher risk perception for falling accidents. On aggregate, ranking the different domains, respondents’ risk perception is almost in perfect correspondence to the ranking of actual incident experience, with the exception that the risk violence is ranked higher than indicated by actual incident experience. On a demographic group level, males and highly educated respondents perceive their risks to be lower than what is expected considering their actual incident experience.