The Role of Parent-level Factors in Protecting Children's Health from Perceived Environmental Threat

Children's risk of exposure to environmental hazards has been shown to differ due to socioeconomic variables, characteristics of the hazard itself, or both. As such, it is imperative to understand factors that influence parents' behaviors to protect their children. A thorough review of the literature on protective health behavior in contexts of environmental risk suggests that parent response to children's risk of exposure is associated with perceptions of control, risk perception and socioeconomic and demographic variables. Yet, the literature has not given much consideration to the associations among these variables. The overall goal of this research was to better understand parent behaviors to protect their children's health from environmental threats. The proposed research explored two matters poorly explored in the available literature: 1) the awareness, perception and protectivebehavior characteristics of parents who have children at risk of exposure to an environmental hazard, and 2) the relationships among awareness factors, control and risk perceptions and child-protective health behaviors. Multivariate regression analyses were based on the survey responses of 101 parents of children between the ages of one and six years, living in areas of varying levels of lead exposure. Findings indicate that parents in high risk exposure areas did not differ from parents in low risk areas in terms of their perception of risk, knowledge of the hazard, awareness of risk of exposure from residential sources or behaviors to protect children.