Citation

Gärling A, Gärling T. J. Environ. Psychol. 1990; 10(1): 27-36.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1990, Academic Press)

DOI

10.1016/S0272-4944(05)80022-2

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In a questionnaire 96 parents and 48 nonparents rated how scenarios of changes in their neighborhoods and homes would affect indicators of residential satisfaction such as perceived safety, perceived attractiveness, intentions to protest and intentions to move. Subsets of the change scenarios were intended to increase and respectively decrease children's risk of having an accident; subjects also judged a child's accident risk in the ages 2-4, 5-6, 7-9 and 10-12 years as well as to what degree environment, parents, child, others and chance were believed to cause a child's accident. Risk perceptions were, as in previous research, found to be related to the ratings of the strengths of the causes, to vary as intended for the different scenarios, and not to differ between parents and nonparents. The ratings of residential satisfaction tended to show that parents, to a greater extent than nonparents, were affected by their perceptions of children's accident risk. In particular, change scenarios increasing accident risk affected parents. Nonparents were in particular less affected than parents by scenarios decreasing accident risk.