Parents' heuristics for judging children's accident risk

Heuristics parents use for judging the risk or likelihood of accidents to children were investigated. It was first hypothesized that the risk is judged on the basis of the number of personally experienced previous accidents or near-accidents which are recalled. Mothers, sampled from a general population, female undergraduates who had theoretical knowledge but little experience with children, and female students with both little theoretical knowledge and experience judged the risk that a child at the age of 2-4, 5-6, 7-9, and 10-12 years have an accident where the subjects lived. In Experiment 1 no further specification of accident was given, in Experiment 2 a number of types of accidents were specified. A positive relationship between judged risk and the number of recalled accidents was found but the latter referred to generic classes rather than to personal experiences, and the mothers did not judge the risk as higher and did not recall more accidents than the other subjects. In Experiment 3 where the risk of accidents to children was judged from specific descriptions, the importance of causal conceptions of accidents was verified by the fact that subjects predominantly mentioned the presence of a number of causes (e.g., the child's lack of skill) as reasons why they judged the accidents as likely as they did. The results furthermore were similar when subjects gave reasons for their judgements as when they were asked to explain why the accidents occurred.