Societal considerations in scaling injury severity and effects

Abstract

When assessing products to be introduced into the stream of commerce, judgments must be made which consider and balance many characteristics of the product system, including the safety of users and bystanders. Many guidelines and criteria exist for quantifying product performance, maintainability, reliability, cost, and so on, but safety is not easily measured in objective terms. Experience in courts has shown that the traditional methods of safety evaluation tend to be unacceptable to society as represented in juries. In the opinion of the authors, one of the main reasons for this is that traditional methods do not include a societal perspective. These methods of evaluation tend to concentrate on the costs and benefits from a business perspective and do not adequately treat the viewpoint and values of society. This paper discusses the development of a weighting scale that indicates the effects of product-related injury severity levels relative to one another when assessed from society's perspective as reflected by jury verdicts returned in personal injury litigation. It suggests an approach that allows consideration of this societal perspective in the evaluation of safety-related concerns and their potential resolutions.