文章基本信息

标题：Worrying About Terrorism and Other Acute Environmental Health Hazard Events
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作者：Michael Greenberg ; Lauren Babcock-Dunning
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2012
卷号：102
期号：4
页码：651-656
DOI：10.2105/AJPH.2011.300434
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Objectives . To better understand why some people worry more about terrorism compared with others, we measured how much US residents worried about a terrorist event in their area and examined the association of their fears with their concerns about acute and chronic hazards and other correlates. Methods . In 2008 (n = 600) and 2010 (n = 651), we performed a random-digit dialing national landline telephone survey. We asked about worries about terrorism and 5 other environmental health hazard issues. We also collected demographic and socioeconomic data. Results . Only 15% worried “a great deal” about a terrorist event in their area and 18% to 33% were greatly concerned about other environmental issues. Fear about acute hazard events was a stronger predictor of a great deal of concern about terrorism than were age, race/ethnicity, gender, educational achievement, and other correlates. Conclusions . Those who worried most about acute environmental health hazard events were most likely to worry about terrorism. Also, those who were older, poorer, Blacks, or Latinos, or who lived in populous urban areas felt they were most vulnerable to terrorist attacks. We recommend methods to involve US citizens as part of disaster planning. More than a decade has passed since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania woke up the US population to the reality that they could be at risk. Immediately after the events of 9/11, many US residents were extremely concerned about further attacks; however, this concern has markedly declined in the intervening years. For example, on October 7, 2001, an ABC News and Washington Post poll asked 1133 US adults how concerned they were that there would be more terrorist attacks in the United States. 1 Forty-one percent worried “a great deal” and only 17% did not worry “too much” or “at all.” In September 2008, the proportion that worried “a great deal” was 18% and the proportion that did not worry “too much” or “at all” was 36%, in essence, a reversal of the numbers. 2,3 Public perceptions about personal exposure to a terrorist attack have not changed much since 9/11. A USA Today and Gallup poll in November 2001 found 8% of Americans were “very worried” that they or someone in their family would become a victim of terrorism, and these proportions stayed in the 5% to 14% range during the following 8 years. Five CNN and Opinion Research Corporation polls between 2006 and 2010 reported that 4% to 5% of Americans thought it “very likely” that there would be an act of terrorism in their community in the near future, whereas an average of 50% thought it “not at all likely.” 1 We sought to measure how worried US residents were in the years 2008 and 2010 about a terrorist event occurring in their area and to better understand why some people worry and others do not by considering 2 questions: Is worrying about terrorism associated with worrying about other acute environmental health events? How does this association compare with associations between terrorism and chronic environmental events and other predictors, such as demographic characteristics, resident location, and selected values and preferences about government? Risk perception researchers have examined about 100 hazards in more than a dozen countries ranging from in-office medical uses of x-rays to global warming. The hazards have been categorized across more than 2 dozen dimensions, such as newness, voluntariness, social knowledge, social benefit, short- and long-term consequences, and controllability. 4–7 The hazards cluster into types. For example, Slovic 4 observed that members of the US League of Women Voters and college students ranked nuclear power first out of 30 different risks, and technological hazards were disproportionately high among the risks of greatest concern. Bronfman and Cifuentes found that nuclear weapons were the most dreaded risk among Chilean residents followed by earthquakes and landslides. 5 The set of acute hazard events have a low probability of occurring but can kill and injure large numbers of people in an area over a short period of time. In contrast, traditional public health risks such as tobacco smoking and alcohol abuse are quiet killers that are perceived as chronic hazards taking their toll continuously and spread out geographically rather than clustering. In these risk perception studies, smoking and alcohol, when part of the study, almost always cluster with bicycling, swimming, and skiing. We hypothesized that terrorism is among the low-probability, potentially high-consequence acute events that worry some people and that those who worry about terrorism are also likely to worry about natural hazard events (e.g., tornadoes, hurricanes), nuclear energy–related events (e.g., explosions at reactors), and accidents during the transportation of hazardous chemicals. We also expected more concern about terrorism among those who also worry about chronic hazards such as global warming, traffic congestion, and development than among those who did not worry about these chronic hazard events. Like the hurricane that scares people into thinking that they should not locate in a flood plain and the oil spill that scares people into thinking about reducing their energy use, a terrorist event has a good deal of “signal value,” as it can provoke some people into thinking that the event is the harbinger of what is to come. 4 We also measured the salience of terrorism for disadvantaged populations. The strongest initial supporters of the environmental movement of the 1970s were middle-income Whites. However, the strongest supporters are now economically disadvantaged populations, 8 and we also expected to find greater concern about terrorism in these populations. In other words, the economically disadvantaged living in large cities with limited mobility choices were assumed to be disproportionately concerned.