Abstract
Today, new environmental fears are central to individual and collective concerns. The development of our society creates new kinds of risks whose medium- and long-term effects are unknown. The term ‘emerging risks’ relates to the occurrence of new dangers, new exposures, new behaviors, or a recent legal or collective awareness. These kinds of risks are linked to modernity and new technologies, and may be correlated to the use of new products. They constitute a threat with their growing impact on quality of life, health and well-being. This is the case of health risks associated with electromagnetic fields, which are highly controversial, and health and environmental risks associated with GMOs or the use of pesticides.
We raise the issue of the way these new threats are experienced and represented. How do they affect the quality of life and well-being of the populations concerned? To answer these questions, we consider how individuals evaluate their living conditions and their environmental well-being. For this purpose, we focus on social representations of some emerging risks based on two studies: the first is linked to exposure to electromagnetic fields; the second looks at the consequences of using pesticides. The analysis of the content and structure of social representations of these objects and associated risks are related both to the state of knowledge on the topic and to changing practices and behaviors in these fields.
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Notes
- 1.
The Quebec ethics committee requires subjects to be informed about the object of study in a survey. It was only included in the Quebec sample, not the French one.
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Marchand, D., Weiss, K., Zouhri, B. (2017). Emerging Risks and Quality of Life: Towards New Dimensions of Well-Being?. In: Fleury-Bahi, G., Pol, E., Navarro, O. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Psychology and Quality of Life Research. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31416-7_29
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