Terrorism Risk Assessment, Recollection Bias, and Public Support for Counterterrorism Policy and Spending.

Recollection bias (RB) refers to the phenomenon whereby after an adverse event people report that their risk assessment about a similar future event is presently no higher than their recollection of their pre-event risk assessment. While previous research has outlined this theoretical construct and generated important empirical findings, there were some limitations. We design and employ a new national representative survey to address these limitations in this study.

Exposure Path Perceptions and Protective Actions in Biological Water Contamination Emergencies.

This study extends the Protective Action Decision Model, developed to address disaster warning responses in the context of natural hazards, to "boil water" advisories. The study examined 110 Boston residents' and 203 Texas students' expectations of getting sick through different exposure paths for contact with contaminated water. In addition, the study assessed respondents' actual implementation (for residents) or behavioral expectations (for students) of three different protective actions - bottled water, boiled water, and personally chlorinated water - as well as their demographic characteristics and previous experience with water contamination.

Psychometric and demographic predictors of the perceived risk of terrorist threats and the willingness to pay for terrorism risk management programs.

A 2009 national telephone survey of 924 U.S. adults assessed perceptions of terrorism and homeland security issues.

Disproportionality at the "front end" of the child welfare services system: an analysis of rates of referrals, "hits", "misses", and "false alarms".

Data from NIS-4, NCANDS, and the State of California were used to analyze the front end of the child welfare services system--the referral and substantiation components--in terms of the system's ability to diagnose or detect instances of child maltreatment. The analyses show that Blacks are disproportionately represented in rates of referral into the system. Moreover, the analyses demonstrate that the system is less accurate for Blacks than for other racial or ethnic groups.

Measurement error, skewness, and risk analysis: coping with the long tail of the distribution.

Probabilistic risk analyses often construct multistage chance trees to estimate the joint probability of compound events. If random measurement error is associated with some or all of the estimates, we show that resulting estimates of joint probability may be highly skewed. Joint probability estimates based on the analysis of multistage chance trees are more likely than not to be below the true probability of adverse events, but will sometimes substantially overestimate them.