Purpose: To evaluate the operation of the medical risk subscale for the Domain-Specific Risk Taking Scale (DOSPERT) proposed by Schwartz, et al. (2012), and test the hypothesis that medical risk attitudes are distinct from those measured in the DOSPERT health/safety subscale.
Method: Risk taking (RT), risk perception (RP), and benefit perception (BP) was measured using the 36-item DOSPERT scale with the new medical risk subscale (DOSPERT+M) administered to a US-representative online panel. Medical activities include donating blood, donating a kidney, participating in a clinical trial, taking daily allergy medication, knee replacement surgery, and general anesthesia in dentistry. To reduce respondent burden, each of 344 respondents was randomly assigned to two of the three tasks with task order counterbalanced (RT+RP n=108, RT+BP n=126, RP+BP n=110). We created composite scores for each task for each of the six DOSPERT+M domains (financial, social, ethical, health/safety, recreational, and medical), examined subscale reliability and correlations between the medical composites and other domain composites in each task, and fitted multiple linear regression models to assess the impact of demographic differences (gender, ethnicity, age, income, education, marital status) on medical composites.
Result: The medical subscale evinced moderate interitem consistency (Cronbach's alpha RT=0.56, RP=0.66, BP=0.74). As hypothesized, correlations between the medical and health/safety domains were small for risk-taking (r=.12, p=0.07), risk perception (r=.25, p<.001), and benefit perception (r<.01, p=0.99). In fact, the medical subscale were most strongly associated with attitudes and perceptions of social risks (RT r=0.41, RP r=0.46, BP r=0.53). We found no demographic differences in willingness to take medical risks. Hispanic respondents gave slightly higher average ratings of riskiness for medical activities than Caucasian respondents (standardized regression coefficient Beta=0.15, p=.04), and separated respondents gave higher ratings than married respondents (Beta=0.15, p=.04). Women gave higher average ratings of benefit for medical activities than men (Beta=.15, p=.023) as did respondents with higher household incomes (Beta=.17, p=0.29). These differ substantially from demographic associations with mean responses to the social risk scale.
Conclusion: The DOSPERT health/safety subscale does not appear to measure attitudes and perceptions associated with typical medical activities faced by patients. Instead attitudes toward medical activities appear to be associated with attitudes toward social risks, which may reflect the interpersonal impact of many medical decisions, but demonstrate different patterns of individual difference.