Focus on Linkages Among Different Personal Risk Management Behaviors Involving Small Sets of Life Domains

This new web site section comprises a series of theoretical and empirical texts that address aspects of and issues in personal risk management associated with specific life domains, including attention to related issues in other life domains. As regards theoretical papers and books dealing with aspects of personal risk management, there is a variety of literature particularly in the fields of insurance, behavioral economics, health sciences and psychology. Key Demographics in Retirement Risk Management offers a take-off on this literature with text that deals with a concept called "comprehensive person risk management" (CPRM).

 
CPRM focuses on linkages among potential pitfalls in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones, and on the implications of these linkages for the design of personal risk management responses.  For example, how much are people aware of and attentive to these linkages?  And if they are attentive, how much does the attention affect their personal integration of separate risk management responses? Patterns of inter-personal and inter-group variation in the answers to these questions seem to be important.

The materials provided in this section focus on specific kinds of potential pitfalls taking place in particular life domains, such as that of financial management.  From a base provided by that kind of specificity (illustrated in Chapter 5 of Key Demographics in Retirement Risk Management, which deals with utilization of financial advisors)  we will move on to limited sets of linkages involving the targeted pitfalls and potential mishaps in other life domains. Here will arise theory and research questions concerning population behaviors in addressing the linkages. There is a lot of useful work to be done here concerning cascades of potential pitfalls and linked risk management responses, without taking us all the way to the over-arching concept of CPRM.

Texts available from this web site section will develop a broadened theoretical framework, where CPRM is just one component. Some initial thoughts about this broadened theoretical framework are now available in a paper that you can obtain as a PDF file by clicking on the link within Paper 1 of the table of contents for this section.

Table of Contents

• (Paper #1) Sketching risk management domains that are integrated to achieve comprehensive personal risk management, by Leroy O. Stone, Département de démographie, Université de Montréal (click here to go to Paper #1) . There is also a synopsis below.

• (Paper #2) A great new book on America’s coming retirement crisis helps us highlight the need for comprehensive retirement risk management, by Leroy O. Stone, Département de démographie, Université de Montréal (click here to go to Paper #2).

Here are some highlights from Paper #1.

• Definitions of "risk" and "risk management" are provided and made specific to our universe of discourse.
• I introduce Professor Gerd Gigerenzer's concept of risk literacy, which he says is highly desirable for living in the 21st century (he is,Director of the Center for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and a former Professor of Psychology at University of Chicago).
• I raise three questions that should drive the work in behavioral studies:
(1) What do people know about risk management activity in specific life domain X, as well as about linking risk management activity in domain X to such activities in other domains?
(2) How attentive are they to what might seem to be requirements for engaging in risk management activities?
(3) What are they actually doing when they carry out such activities?
• One practical aspect of these questions involves attributes of persons who are doing well, or doing poorly, regarding risk management activities in particular life domains where linkages with other domains are important.
• I mention some of the life domains of interest and provide a matrix that points to linkages among them.
• I discuss the question of whether physical and mental fitness, as well as social interconnectedness, should be treated as sub-domains of the health life domain, noting that the answer depends on how "health" is defined.
• If we focus upon absence of disease when thinking about health, then it seems advisable to treat as highly overlapping life domains such matters as bone density, vision efficacy, hearing capacity, and cognitive power. A person may seem healthy and yet be quite weak in performance on all four of these topics
As you will note, there is no rocket science here.  I am just setting up a framework within which to address different sets of linked risk management issues, pointing to theory and research issues about the pertinent population behaviors. Click here to get the full paper.

In Chapter 1 you will find an exposé on the basic concepts and theory regarding comprehensive retirement-related risk management (CPRM).

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(c) 2014 Leroy O. Stone. All rights reserved.