Pre-service professionals' constructs of adolescent risk-taking and approaches to risk management

Abstract

The research explored constructs of potentially harmful adolescent risk-taking of 220 university students in their final year of degree courses in education, law, medicine, nursing, psychology and social work, who anticipated they would be dealing with young people professionally. Their personal risk hierarchies, and their own experience of risk-taking when they were teenagers, were investigated as potential influences upon the normative orientations of their future professional roles, expressed in their support for varying social policy options including zero tolerance and harm minimization. Findings suggest that their commitment to underlying value positions regarding risk-taking and risk-management were not significantly related to gender, age or personal risk-taking profiles but to professional socialization in their degree course. The implications of respondents' preferred ways of dealing with adolescent risk-taking as compared to young people's choices for themselves are explored, along with concepts of risk management in current policy frameworks.