Intensive parenting culture imposes upon parents the responsibility to invest all their cognitive and affective resources to protect their children's health, making parenting a risky business that triggers anxiety and possible regret. In this context, decisions about childhood vaccinations assume a critical significance, implying, with vaccine acceptance and refusal, the posture that public health literature defines as vaccine hesitancy. Based upon and illustrated through qualitative analyses of data drawn from an international rapid team ethnography, this article presents a typology of parents' stances towards childhood vaccines. The 'surprising fact' of refusing vaccines - deemed as one of the greatest public health successes - is tentatively framed in an evidence-based typology whose axes articulate two theoretical dimensions: the degree of trust in healthcare institutions and the generality of the cognitive assumptions parents adopt. The typology distinguishes six 'stances', expressing different forms of vaccine acceptance and refusal. Each stance is dissected considering the assumptions on which it rests, the strategies used to face uncertainty and vulnerability through different forms of trusting, and its typical epistemic and psychological profile. Particular attention is devoted to parents' lay risk metrics - namely, the contrasting probability principles through which they assess the risk of adverse events following immunisation - and to the epistemic orientations, paradigmatic or narrative that underpin them.
This article explores how different stakeholders imagine and negotiate risk in the emerging field of intelligent neuroprostheses (INPs) for Parkinson's disease. Drawing on qualitative research conducted within the Horizon 2020 SYNCH project, we examine how clinicians, engineers, and patients construct divergent sociotechnical imaginaries around INPs; visions that shape not only expectations of innovation but also perceptions of safety, ethics, and therapeutic legitimacy. While previous research shows that individuals navigate risk and uncertainty through 'in-between' strategies grounded in intuition, emotion, and trust, we move beyond this focus on individual coping to demonstrate that such strategies are collectively produced within sociotechnical imaginaries. From this perspective, risk is not only managed but imagined, embedded in shared moral, institutional, and cultural visions of desirable futures. On one side, Techno-Progressive Optimists and Pragmatic Conditionalists frame risk as a manageable and proportional challenge, as something to be mitigated through technological refinement, personalisation, and clinical expertise. On the other, Ontological Realists, Biomedical Conservatives, and Techno-Sceptical Traditionalists construct risk as a moral and existential boundary, evoking fears of dehumanisation, loss of agency, and the erosion of the therapeutic relationship. Patients' experiences further illustrate how risk is continuously reinterpreted through everyday practices of adaptation, embodiment, and trust-building. Ultimately, the study shows that understanding how risk is imagined is crucial for the responsible governance of AI-driven neurotechnologies, ensuring that innovation remains ethically grounded, socially responsive, and attentive to inequality in access and experience.
As AI is deployed in healthcare contexts, medical professionals undergo technology-driven challenges, such as maintaining control over the diagnostic process and renegotiating their tasks and areas of expertise. In this article, we explore the social and professional implications of AI in healthcare contexts in Italy. We do this by investigating the multiple factors that co-construct trust in AI systems. We also examine the various forms of boundary work that professionals use to redefine their authority and professional autonomy. We employ a mixed-methods research design, including a survey (n = 193) and 22 in-depth interviews with clinicians, addressing clinicians' AI awareness and knowledge, use of AI in medical practice, trust relations and concerns regarding medical professionalism. Our findings suggest that different assemblages of trustworthiness collated into three trusting attitudes (relational-practical, institutional-regulatory and epistemic-infrastructural), showing how trust in medical tools is being configured in the AI age. Clinicians reported performing three strategies of boundary work (defensive, regulatory and transformative) in negotiating their roles and expertise. This boundary work was narrated as a response to working contexts in which AI's influence led to contested workflows, altered decision-making authority and redefined professional boundaries.
The growing integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into mental health care raises critical questions for risk studies about how trust, risk perception, and professional responsibility are reconfigured in algorithmically mediated therapeutic contexts. This study examines how Italian mental health professionals negotiate and interpret the introduction of AI into psychological practice, with particular attention to the social construction of risk and the conditions under which trust in algorithmic systems is extended or withheld. Data were collected in Italy between May and July 2025 through semi-structured interviews with 14 practicing psychologists, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three interconnected dimensions emerged. First, professionals actively constructed risk perception through boundary work, distinguishing between acceptable instrumental automation and threatening encroachments on clinical judgement. Second, trust towards algorithmic systems and digital platforms was negotiated selectively and conditionally, shaped by algorithmic opacity and the reorganisation of therapeutic labour within platform economies. Third, vulnerable patients emerged as a site of amplified risk, where structural inequalities in the Italian mental health care system were compounded by unsupervised reliance on low-cost AI tools. These findings suggest that risk and trust in AI-mediated mental health care cannot be addressed through technical or regulatory frameworks alone, but require collective responses attentive to the relational, epistemic, and structural conditions under which care is practiced.
This paper examines AI narratives in healthcare and, more specifically, how people attribute trust to the role of AI in breast cancer detection. To do so, it draws on a content analysis conducted on 701 online user comments to a New York Times article, using Sztompka's trust framework to identify and scrutinise the different forms of trust at play. Findings offer critical insights for digital health studies and social science studies of risk and uncertainty. At the analytical level, the article operationalises Sztompka's trust framework as an interpretive lens to scrutinise how trust is negotiated and problematised within AI narratives on breast cancer detection. At the empirical level, we highlight that technological trust in AI does not emerge in a vacuum, but is rather intertwined with other kinds of trust: positional trust in physicians, segmental trust in the U.S. healthcare system, and the related organisational trust. These different trust domains act as interpretive frameworks through which individuals negotiate their trust in the role of AI. In this sense, technological trust in AI emerges as relational, context-dependent, and shaped by broader socio-institutional and political conditions. Moreover, we show that, rather than adopting polarised stances towards AI, several users expressed a moderate position, advocating for the use of AI under human supervision, given that the patient-doctor relationship was considered irreplaceable. This position emerged as a normative strategy to reduce uncertainty, redistribute and control diagnostic risk. Simultaneously, this has the potential to undermine the diagnostic authority of doctors.
This article investigates how Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems reshape risk and uncertainty in dementia care by proposing a conceptual shift from technological efficacy to hybrid intelligence. Drawing on empirical research conducted in both residential and home-based care settings in Italy, and based on interviews with professional and informal caregivers, the study explores how AI technologies such as telemonitoring systems and GPS trackers not only assist but co-construct care practices. Rather than functioning as neutral tools, AI systems emerge as epistemic and moral agents that actively participate in framing vulnerability, distributing responsibility, and redefining what counts as actionable risk. The analysis reveals that far from eliminating uncertainty, AI redistributes it, often intensifying the interpretive and affective labour of caregivers. Through the lens of hybrid intelligence, the article foregrounds the relational and situated nature of human-AI collaboration and argues for a critical reconceptualisation of risk in algorithmic health environments. This reframing emphasises the socio-technical entanglements, epistemic asymmetries, and moral decisions embedded in contemporary care infrastructures.
In contemporary health care, future imaginaries are increasingly shaped by the anticipated integration of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies are framed both as tools to improve current clinical practices and as catalysts for profound transformations in healthcare delivery. This study explores how clinicians engage with these innovations in their daily practice, shaping sociotechnical futures through discourse, negotiation, and professional positioning. Drawing on twenty-four qualitative interviews with surgeons and radiologists in Italian hospitals and research centres, this study examines how robotics and AI affect clinical relationships, generate new trust and risk configurations, and challenge existing professional boundaries. The findings show that clinicians act as epistemic mediators who recalibrate patient expectations, negotiate uncertainties, and engage in discursive strategies to defend or reconfigure their inter- and intra- professional jurisdiction. These insights lead us to call for support for adaptive professional cultures through training that integrates technical and relational skills, the active engagement of professional associations, and opportunities for critical reflection on the evolving role of robotics and AI in healthcare.
This article investigates how European citizens perceive the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare systems, focusing in particular on the interplay between perceived benefits and regulatory expectations. Drawing on data from the Special Eurobarometer 551 survey conducted in March 2024 across the 27 EU Member States (N > 26,000), the study explores national and sociodemographic variations in how AI is evaluated in terms of healthcare relevance, public regulation, and digital rights implementation. The findings reveal widespread support for AI in improving diagnostic accuracy and operational efficiency, particularly among younger, urban, and digitally connected populations. However, these optimistic views coexist with significant concern over data privacy, the depersonalisation of care, and the opacity of algorithmic decision-making. Citizens in countries with more robust digital infrastructures tend to exhibit both higher confidence in AI and stronger demands for regulatory safeguards. Conversely, in less digitally developed contexts, public trust and expectations remain lower. Framed within the sociology of risk and sociotechnical imaginaries, this study demonstrates that perceptions of AI are not merely technical assessments but are deeply embedded in social inequalities, (dis)trust in institutions, and cultural narratives of progress and control. The research calls for inclusive, context-sensitive governance frameworks that address digital divides and reinforce public accountability. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on how emerging technologies transform not only clinical practices but also public expectations, ethical standards, and the governance of health-related risk.
Communicating the harms associated with participation in national screening programmes is not a straightforward process. In a previous study, we interviewed Danish women in the age group 23-55 and found that they tended to reject or downplay the harms presented in an information pamphlet related to cervical cancer screening. This phenomenon we termed the 'Perception Gap'. In this article, we revisit the original data and draw on theoretical frameworks of governmentality and risk to elucidate the dynamics behind this perception gap. We found that the information material, itself, has minimal influence on how individuals understand and give meaning to the benefits and harms of screening. Instead, culturally and socially constructed logics of cancer and screening were essential to the women's meaning-making of cancer screening. We argue that the perception gap emerges from governmental power, as participants were not passively governed, but internalised prevailing norms and aligned their attitudes with socially constructed expectations that position screening participation as the only responsible way to manage health. This leaves little room for individuals to pursue individual preferences that conflict with this collectively constructed notion. We found that non-participation itself was constructed as implying that the individual bears responsibility for potential burdens such as later development of cancer. We argue that the collectively constructed concepts of cancer and screening identified in this article, as well as how they are used in governance, need to be addressed and critically challenged before harms of screening can be effectively communicated and meaningfully incorporated into decision-making.
Deciding to get children vaccinated against COVID-19 is not something families 'just do' in contexts where neoliberal values shape social norms and governance. Vaccination decisions are socially situated, involve multiple actors, and require careful consideration of competing risks in relation to expectations of 'good' parents. Informed by theoretical approaches to emotion and risk, our study contributes to understanding parents' perspectives of their own and children's roles in vaccination decision-making in the neoliberal context of Canada. We analysed semi-structured interviews with 48 parents with at least one child over 11-years-old using a feminist discourse analysis approach. We apply theory about emotion and risk to map participant accounts onto three cultural expectations of 'good' parents that were consistent with neoliberal values during the pandemic. First, we found participants reiterated discourses about individualised responsibility when describing vaccine risk assessment with or for children within family units. Second, they reflected on pandemic constraints, which were in tension with expectations for individualised risk management - for example, collective responsibility to get vaccinated, social pressure, and blame. Third, participants evidenced socialising children towards supposedly rational and individualised choices. We conclude by discussing how the ways families do vaccine decision-making are structured by and reproductive of neoliberal values, reproducing widespread acceptance of governmental deferral of responsibility for communal health threats onto individuals.
This study examines the influence of perceived social acceptability on engagement in risk talk. This study views risk perception as a socially negotiated phenomenon, where perceptions and discussions of risk are not just personal but also shaped by community norms and shared understandings. If people perceive a risk as widely accepted, they may be less likely to engage in conversation on that risk. We tested this question using linear regression and structural equation modelling (SEM) on multiple recreational risks with varying levels of social acceptance. The results indicate that a higher perceived social risk acceptability is associated with less engagement in risk talk. This relationship appears to operate mainly through risk willingness and risk perception. A small, robust effect remains, however, even when controlling for these factors. The SEM suggests a directional pattern between risk perception, risk talk, and social, informational, and benefit-related factors, consistent with risk perception functioning less as an independent driver and more a conduit for these factors. Illustrating the interplay between social acceptability, risk talk engagement, risk willingness, risk perception, and risk knowledge, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of individual and social dynamics in the context of the social processing and diffusion of risk understandings.
The notion of risk is decisive in childhood vaccination campaigns, yet parental and paediatricians' understandings of risk are not necessarily congruent with formalised risk assessments. Likewise, formalised risk assessments tell us little about the (risk) work that policies entail for their target groups. We draw on the concept of risk work to examine how parents of infants and paediatricians negotiate vaccine-related risks in paediatric consultations. This study uses qualitative data collected between 2023 and 2025, including ethnographic observations of 243 consultations in Austrian paediatric clinics and 43 interviews with parents and paediatricians. Our findings illustrate risk work in paediatric consultations in three situations: tinkering with policy recommendations, negotiating the number of vaccinations per appointment, and prioritising vaccines. We found that risk work in vaccination consultations involved relational evaluative practices in which parents and paediatricians negotiated multiple risk objects, objects at risk, and risk relationships. In these interactions, they continuously balanced and reconfigured personal, social, and institutional dimensions of risk. These contingent understandings of risk were frequently not in line with formalised models of risk assessment. Exploring this divergence was vital against the background of recurrent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases and the growing polarisation concerning what counts as acceptable risks in vaccination practices.
Detention under mental health law is based on professional assessments of risk but impacts on patients' trust. Little attention has been paid by sociologists to the operation of risk, trust and racism during mental health detention processes. Our study addresses this gap through thirteen qualitative interviews with professionals, conducted in England in 2023 focusing on the mental health detention of British African Caribbean men: a group disproportionately detained. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and the SILENCES framework. Participant accounts highlighted mistrust between British African Caribbean men and mental health services. This group's mental health was seen to be affected at a macro level by poverty, drug misuse and racism, as well as cultural mistrust and bias. Negative assumptions of British African Caribbean men were seen to operate at a meso level through institutional practices within risk management processes that discriminated against them, leading to coercive treatments and poorer outcomes. Micro level factors were largely absent from interviews. Participants stressed the need to rebuild trust with British African Caribbean communities, but the strategies they described overlooked the macro and meso factors identified elsewhere within interviews. The article is significant in highlighting cultural drivers of (mis)trust between mental health services and British African Caribbean men at macro and meso levels.
Prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer worldwide, leading the European Commission to suggest prostate cancer screening with prostate specific antigen (PSA) as part of their policy for more and better screening. Screening with PSA is, however, contested due to ambiguous evidence of whether benefits outweigh negative consequences. Treatment may cause incontinence and impotence, potentially threatening masculinity. Learning that one is at risk for prostate cancer could instigate a sense of vulnerability among men who are eligible for screening. The uncertainty associated with screening with PSA, combined with the threat to masculinity, would potentially stop men from participating. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate perspectives that men in Norway have on prostate cancer screening before it is implemented as a national screening programme. Our study encompassed 10 focus groups with 48 men aged 54-85 in Norway. Seven groups included men diagnosed with prostate cancer. Data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. We identified two main themes: 1) Prostate cancer screening was beneficial despite uncertainties, and 2) Organized screening with PSA made threats to masculinity acceptable. Participants were positive towards screening because they saw early detection as beneficial. The simplicity of screening through a blood test concealed the complexity of the screening outcome and its consequences. Having an organised screening programme for prostate cancer appeared to our focus group participants as an opportunity enabling men to take care of their health without jeopardising their masculinity.
This research explores the emotionality of narratives on outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases following the COVID-19 pandemic. It relies on an emotional-discursive approach interested in outbreak narratives' emotion orientations, and focuses more specifically on narratives' potential to (re)direct conduct through the use of emotional notions. Taking the 2024 Montr & eacute;al measles outbreak as a case study, we relied on a joint methodology combining the analysis of media items (n = 65) and social media conversations (n = 545 Reddit comments). Narrative and emotional-discursive analyses of the data identified four outbreak narratives, each describing the outbreak by relying on emotional notions promoting ways to (re)direct conducts: 1) an epidemiological narrative supported by the emotional notion of re-emerging disease and promoting acts of collaboration; 2) a vaccine hesitancy denunciation narrative supported by notions of anti-science and neglected children and promoting confrontation, exclusion and education; 3) a post-pandemic narrative supported by the emotional notion of COVID-19 and promoting preparation; and 4) a globalisation narrative supported by the notion of a borderless world and promoting self-protection. Our research points to the emotional aspects of perspectives on vaccination by exposing diverse emotional notions which constitute the discursive landscape surrounding vaccination, and by showing various emotional modes of (re)directing vaccine-related conduct. We argue that polarising discourses on vaccination prominent during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak have only slightly changed since the pandemic. The emotional-discursive complexity of the issue of vaccination is discussed.
This qualitative study investigates steroid use among Malay men in Malaysia, focusing on their motivations, perceptions of risk, and the negotiation of masculinity within fitness and social media cultures. The widespread promotion of hyper-muscular male bodies on platforms like Facebook and Instagram has intensified pressure to conform to idealised masculine physiques. In response, many men turn to anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) - despite their regulation under Malaysia's Poisons Act 1952-as a quick means to enhance appearance and performance. Drawing on Zinn's theory of risk-taking and Giritli Nygren and Olofsson's concept of Doing Risk, the analysis focuses upon how users rationalise steroid use within local cultural and social contexts. Based on in-depth interviews with Malay AAS users in Klang Valley public gyms, the findings reveal a tension between physical ideals and health awareness. Participants actively manage risks through peer knowledge, alternative remedies, and selective engagement with medical advice. Steroid use emerges not simply as a deviant act, but as a socially embedded strategy for constructing masculine identity and achieving bodily ideals. This study highlights how risk, health, and masculinity intersect in the everyday lives of Malay men navigating modern gym and media cultures in Malaysia.
Public perceptions and discussion of scientific facts became crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic, as various risk estimation claims were used to legitimate novel state of exception policies at a global level and related public health intervention programmes. Critical perspectives in the social sciences have argued that the mainstream media presented an exaggerated account of scientific consensus while excluding well-founded critical dissent. This article presents a qualitative-textual analysis of one example of this form of knowledge construction: the use of the 'conspiracy theory' category within articles published by The Guardian newspaper in the UK between February 2020 and February 2022. Our analysis shows that these articles tended to conflate engaged critical positions on pandemic policies with irrational conspiracy theories, thus excluding these former positions from rational discussion and debate. We term this mechanism of exclusion epistemic quarantine, arguing that this extension of the conspiracy-theory category to include scepticism or criticism mis-labelled and potentially alienated genuine scientific criticism, eroding trust among some communities, obscuring sincere plural public health perspectives and undermining the longer-term legitimacy of science.
The scientific field of epigenetics - and its social and ethical repercussions - has been met with a mixture of cautious optimism and scepticism from social scientists. While acknowledging the possibilities of contributing to a more biosocial account of health, critical scholars are concerned about how this knowledge could be used to intensify risk narratives for certain groups, particularly pregnant people. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 32 pregnancy-related healthcare professionals, this article addresses a gap in knowledge about how epigenetics is translated into antenatal care in practice. We found that although healthcare professionals were very attuned to ideas about the transmission of health and reducing risk exposures, epigenetics was not explicitly discussed with pregnant people. Given this finding, we explore practitioners' reflections on how the concept of 'epigenetic risk' - as a still-nascent way of scientising future risk for maternal and child health - might fit into existing pregnancy care frameworks and the management of risk. We consider how it might contribute to discussions of health and risk more generally, particularly for reframing ideas of reproduction, responsibility and future health. We suggest any future translation should be attuned to the complex navigations of risk as practiced in pregnancy care.
During pregnancy, women are commonly considered responsible for minimising foetal risks by actively engaging in reproductive asceticism. Cigarette smoking is culturally constructed as 'risky behaviour' with adverse health outcomes. This article explores how health-providers discuss smoking risk in pregnancy, women's perceptions of those conversations, and the impact on their smoking behaviour and understandings of self-worth. Health-providers (midwives n = 53, hospital obstetricians n = 11, general practitioners n = 6 and smoking cessation counsellors n = 2) who provided antenatal care, and women (n = 17, either pregnant or birthed within 10 years, who smoked or stopped smoking during pregnancy) from northern Adelaide participated in semi-structured focus groups or interviews. Thematic analysis of recorded discussions revealed four themes in a positive-feedback cycle when describing antenatal smoking risk. Health-providers tended to adopt foetal-focussed persuasive moralising to promote behaviour change (1), leading women to feel worthless and unimportant (2). Confronted with negative feelings and poor long-term outcomes, many women described using the risk-taking of smoking to exercise autonomy and agency - exerting control over short-term time horizons (3). Women then aimed to salvage their maternal identities by reducing their daily cigarette consumption but without intention to stop (4). This re-engaged health-providers to use persuasive moralising to describe smoking risks, perpetuating the cycle and eliciting multiple emotional responses in pregnant women that are unfavourable to cessation. Alternative approaches of discussing antenatal smoking risk should be considered and explored that prompt guilt, rather than shame responses for cessation.
This study explores the experiences of third sector organisation (TSO) staff in supporting people who were homeless to access healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 10 TSO staff members, the analysis illustrates how the activities of TSO staff to identify and address factors which inhibited healthcare access can usefully be conceptualised as 'risk work.' This risk work was seen across the different stages of the process of accessing healthcare: helping people identify a need for healthcare, guiding people as they navigated the system of services, facilitating the practicalities of access and supporting interactions with the NHS. The work of these staff encompassed all three aspects of risk work (translating risk, minimising risk and caring in the context of risk). The strongly relational focus of TSO staff's ways of working meant that the element of social relations (caring in the context of risk) was seen to underpin the success of their work. Risk work was also carried out both in a client facing way to support people who were homeless to access services, and in a system facing way to support services to be more accessible. This challenges the typical conceptualisation of healthcare access as a bilateral interaction between the patient and the healthcare system, and instead demonstrates the value of TSO staff as a third-party actor supporting access.
