The perception risk instrument (PRI)

Abstract

Smoking cigarettes represents a behavior that implies severe health risks the consumer is not able to anticipate with certainty. In contrast to most expert assessment, individual risk perceptions of consumers are distorted in many ways. Perceived risk is a complex and multidimensional hypothetical construct that captures the individual assessment of the potential consequences of product use. Since smoking cessation may not be achieved by all cigarette smokers, risk reduction represents a complementary strategy of contributing to public health by reducing adverse consequences of tobacco use. Innovative products that modify, or reduce, the risks of smoking (modified risk tobacco products, MRTPs) can be helpful and beneficial in this regard. For regulatory authorities evaluating MRTPs, the measurement of perceived risk of their usage compared to the perceived risk of other tobacco and nicotine-related products as well as cessation is of utmost importance. Since no currently available measurement instrument meets all necessary and desirable properties of comparable risk perception assessment, a new instrument, the Perceived Risk Instrument (PRI), capturing the domains of Perceived Health Risk and Perceived Addiction Risk, was developed. The PRI provides measures that are directly comparable across different tobacco and nicotine-related products, as well as subpopulations based on current smoking status. Furthermore, the PRI allows for assessing the perceived risk to the individual respondent (personal risk, PRI-P) and the perceived risk to the user of a product in general (general risk, PRI-G) on a comparable scale. The newly developed PRI is expected to advance tobacco research and to inform regulators in their decision making. The development of the instrument can also serve as a showcase for how complex constructs, such as risk perception in the field of tobacco products, can be measured.