Defining risk

Risk is defined here as a person’s perception of “exposure to potentially unfavorable circumstances, or the possibility of incurring nontrivial loss” (Smith & Barrett 2000: 1946). To gather this information, we used a risk mapping technique, which is a two-stage system of ordinal rankings where respondents first identify risks as prompted by open-ended and non-leading questions and then rank the risks they identified (Quinn et al. 2003).

Risk mapping can also be used to connect perceptions to actions, thereby enabling us to describe some solutions to risk or types of coping mechanisms, especially the allocation of labor to alternative economic activities and mobility (this visualization is still in progress). After ranking risks, informants will be asked to detail each in turn and to address how they solved each of these, if and why they no longer could solve them, and how they would like to solve them.