The experience of uncertainty is inherent to the practice of medicine. It influences healthcare professionals’ perceptions of risk and decision-making. Our objective was to provide empirical insights into how healthcare professionals manage uncertainty and navigate risk related to antibiotics in residential aged-care facilities. Interview data from aged-care nurses was coded deductively, drawing on a taxonomy of uncertainty tolerance in medical decision-making developed by Han and colleagues (2021). Additional themes that did not map onto existing codes were inductively coded. Views from the 16 nurses in the study revealed use of a wide range of strategies that often co-occurred when managing their uncertainty. Consulting with colleagues and deferring to others were the most commonly used strategies to reduce uncertainty. ‘Avoidance’ and ‘reflection’ were response-focused strategies that had not been previously described in the taxonomy. Managing uncertainty is an active and ongoing process that requires clinicians to engage multiple strategies, often with conflicting aims. These findings have implications for deepening our understanding of how uncertainty affects healthcare professionals engaged in risk work. They also highlight the need to expand educational interventions to include cognitive strategies focused on managing uncertainty. Additionally, the findings point to the importance of involving multiple stakeholders in sharing the burdens associated with uncertainty in clinical decision-making.

Socioeconomic status (SES) creates disparities in exposure to health and economic risk, but further research is needed to determine how socioeconomic factors influence (1) what risk means to people in romantic relationships, and (2) how couples’ co-constructed meanings of risk affect their relationship trajectory. The experiences of young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic provide a pertinent case to study this. During such a critical and uncertain life course stage, the pandemic’s fallout exacerbated existing SES inequality, and forced couples to navigate the risk of pandemic infection alongside the risk of financial loss. This paper draws from in-depth, individual interviews with romantic partners ages 18–33 (N = 28, 14 couples) in the United States, to analyse the role of two socioeconomic factors (financial resources and occupational advantages) on their co-construction of risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some participants described how their job conditions allowed them to largely avert risk of COVID-19 infection, and the financial resources they had pre-pandemic provided a safety net for them to take opportunistic risks for future financial gain. As a result, they were able to negotiate next steps to deepen their bond. Meanwhile, partners with less of these resources had to negotiate how they would simply be able to get by financially, physically, and in their relationship. Based on these findings, we argue that co-constructed meanings are another mechanism by which SES creates cumulative (dis)advantage, both in couples’ material reality, and in the trajectory of their relationship

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, mobilising public sentiment to contain infection emerged as a common strategy across nations to enhance compliance with stringent measures. However, few studies have explored how citizens respond to governance practices that leverage emotion and risk. This study draws on interviews with 49 Taiwanese citizens returning to Taiwan during the pandemic, analysing their actions under the highly restrictive context of quarantine. Drawing on Lupton’s work on the interplay between risk and emotion, this study develops the concepts of risk work and emotion work to examine the labour-intensive efforts returnees made to comply with the demanding quarantine requirements under the government’s early zero-COVID policy. The findings reveal that, faced with pandemic prevention measures that marked them as risk subjects and excluded them from the community, returnees engaged in emotional regulation to strengthen self-directed risk management and thus fulfil their duties as good citizens. Their commitment was not driven by a top-down imposition of feeling rules but by active investment. This included reframing distress for the greater good, fostering empathy for local risk aversion, and avoiding dissent against authorities. By connecting these individual practices to crisis-driven national narratives of solidarity and Taiwan’s prosocial cultural norms, this study deepens our understanding of how state-society dynamics influence citizens’ self-governance. It also underscores the potential challenges that emotion-risk politics, pursued in the name of collective interests, may pose to democratic values, policy fairness, and sustainability.

Alcohol researchers have debated whether increased globalisation has reduced national differences in alcohol consumption and thus made alcohol cultures more similar. Building on this interest, this article examines the cultural perceptions of alcohol risk among young adult drinkers in Denmark, Estonia and Italy to find out if important cultural differences still exist in Europe. The study is based on 24 focus groups (n = 128) in the three countries with people aged 20–30 and 30–40. Our study shows how each of the three countries had different narratives about risk and drinking. Estonian participants described how heavy drinking could lead to neglecting one’s responsibilities as an adult, which could result in a loss of social status. Italian participants’ alcohol risk assessments were more related to the value of togetherness and social community and the embarrassment that could be felt if this was compromised. Danish participants mentioned few alcohol-related risks and these were primarily linked to the individual and not, as among the Italian and Estonian participants, to the social group or family. The findings of the study are analysed and discussed in the light of overall cultural narratives in each of the three countries and we conclude that alcohol cultures and everyday risk assessments of alcohol may be changing but only slowly.

Anchored in framing theory and the public arenas model, this study investigates the representation and temporal evolution of genetic modification (GM) risk frames on Chinese social media. Through analysis of public discussions on GM risks from 2010 to 2020, and utilising an integration of unsupervised machine learning and computational grounded theory methodologies, this study develops a categorisation schema of 13 GM risk frames. These frames span the full lifecycle of risk social construction, from identification and definition through assessment, social negotiation, attribution, impact evaluation, to management and mitigation. The findings reveal that GM risk discourses are multifaceted, with systematic differences in frame adoption among social actors including government agencies, experts, media outlets, and the general public. The study demonstrates that GM risk frame evolution aligns closely with public attention cycles, exhibiting three distinct patterns: fluctuating decline, punctuated equilibrium, and fluctuating increase. Additionally, it is found that key events or crises catalyse both quantitative changes in frame prominence and qualitative transformations in how GM risks are framed.

This study examined the effect of religious orientation among Korean Protestants on their willingness to comply with preventive measures against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Additionally, this study investigated how media exposure moderates the association between religious orientation and preventive behavioural intention. Data were collected through an online survey completed by 469 Protestants in South Korea between July 17 and 23, 2020. Protestants with higher levels of intrinsic religious or extrinsic-personal religious orientations were more likely to practice preventive behaviours against COVID-19, possibly because of their heighted subjective perception of COVID-19 risk. In contrast, those with higher levels of extrinsic-social religious orientations were less likely to do so, due to their lower perception of subjective risk. These findings highlight that subjective risk perception plays a critical role in shaping preventive behaviours in a public health emergency. Furthermore, media exposure on COVID-19 information moderated the links between extrinsic-social religious orientation and preventive behavioural intention. Specifically, individuals who reported high media exposure to COVID-19 information showed a weaker negative correlation between extrinsic-social religious orientation and preventive behavioural intention compared to those who reported low media exposure.

The Affect Heuristic-Cultural Cognition Theory (AH-CCT) model and the Solution Aversion-based (SA) model both suggest affect, meaning feelings or discrete emotions about a target, mediates associations between ‘culture,’ such as political ideology or cultural biases, and risk responses, such as risk perceptions, protective behaviours, and supportive attitudes towards protective policy. However, the models differ respectively by defining negative affect as directed towards the hazard (‘hazard affect’) or a specific behaviour or policy response (‘solution aversion,’ negative affect about a proposed risk reduction method). We compare these models with longitudinal mediation analysis of U.S. COVID-19 survey data (n = 866 in smallest-sample wave). Solution aversion accounted for more associations of culture with risk perceptions, such as personal risk, collective risk, and risk severity; behaviour and behavioural intentions, regarding mask wearing, avoiding large public gatherings, and vaccination; and support for risk mitigation policies, regarding mask mandates, public gathering bans, and vaccination mandates. Statistically significant direct effects were rare and were mainly for egalitarian cultural bias; indirect effects occurred for egalitarians, political conservatives, and individualists. Implications for further research on risk responses are discussed relative to limited previous work on these affect-mediation models.

In this editorial we highlight the need for empirical studies into the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in healthcare and social work settings, especially studies which are theoretically informed by critical social science studies of risk and uncertainty. In setting out the importance of interpretative and critical traditions for research into such AI-oriented forms of risk work, we propose three important conceptual lines of inquiry which empirical studies might follow. First, we sketch ways in which the enactment of AI in healthcare work may be changing how risk is handled amid professional decision-making, and creating new categories of patient/service-user. Patients may be evaluated as being at lower or higher risk depending, respectively, upon their engagement or non-engagement with AI-technologies. These questions of (non-)engagement lead us to consider, second, the trust and distrust dynamics around AI-technologies, exploring the potential inequalities that can emerge as a result of (non) engagement. We then consider drivers of this technological embrace in terms of hope and magical thinking in technological-imaginaries, connecting these cultural tendencies to broader structures of ideology and political-economic interests. We conclude this editorial with a plea to social scientists to be cautious to avoid both techno-optimistic narratives and alarmist warnings regarding the implications of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, we argue that our focus should be a theoretically informed and detailed examining of how expectations (pertaining to risk, trust, and hope) materialise in practice, particularly in the daily experiences of those who develop and enact AI technologies in care settings.

This article explores the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on everyday life through a qualitative research study focusing on the role of age in managing uncertainty. Grounded in a cultural and symbolic perspective on risk, the study examines how rituals, emotions, and cultural contexts shaped the experiences of individuals aged 15–34 in Milan, Italy, as they navigated daily risks. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews conducted between September 2022 and May 2023, the findings reveal that age significantly influenced how young people navigated post-pandemic uncertainties. The youngest participants often felt fear and anxiety, mainly due to concerns for others’ well-being, coupled with a strong need for social interaction and community. In contrast, slightly older young professionals showed a more complex emotional response characterised by caution, frustration, and empathy. Across all age groups in the sample, daily routines and social interactions kept reinforcing societal norms and hierarchies, particularly concerning generations and family dynamics within Italian culture, with a specific emphasis on vulnerable populations, namely older adults. These findings highlight the importance of considering both life stage and cultural context when analysing responses to uncertainty. Still, they underscore young people’s adaptability as both a reactive process and a forward-looking one involving agency. This flexibility was particularly evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Lombardy region of Italy, where the virus spread earlier and with more severe consequences than in most parts of the Western world.