# Risk factors: Wikis

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A risk factor is a variable associated with an increased risk of disease or infection. Risk factors are correlational and not necessarily causal, because correlation does not imply causation. For example, being young cannot be said to cause measles, but young people are more at risk as they are less likely to have developed immunity during a previous epidemic.

Risk factors are evaluated by comparing the risk of those exposed to the potential risk factor to those not exposed. Let's say that at a wedding, 74 people ate the chicken and 22 of them were ill, while of the 35 people who had the fish or vegetarian meal only 2 were ill. Did the chicken make the people ill?

$Risk = \frac {\mbox{number of persons experiencing event (food poisoning)}} {\mbox{number of persons exposed to risk factor (food)}}$

So the chicken eaters' risk = 22/74 = 0.297
And non-chicken eaters' risk = 2/35 = 0.057.

Those who ate the chicken had a risk over five times as high as those who did not, suggesting that eating chicken was the cause of the illness. Note, however, that this is not proof. Statistical methods would be used in a less clear cut case to decide what level of risk the risk factor would have to present to be able to say the risk factor is linked to the disease (for example in a study of the link between smoking and lung cancer). Even then, no amount of statistical analysis could prove that the risk factor causes the disease; this could only be proven using direct methods such as a medical explanation of the disease's roots.

The earliest use of risk factor analysis dates back to Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine (1020s),[1] though the term "risk factor" was first coined by heart researcher Dr. Thomas R. Dawber in a landmark scientific paper in 1961, where he attributed heart disease to specific conditions (blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking).

Risk factor research has proliferated within the discipline of Criminology in recent years, based largely on the early work of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck in the USA and David Farrington in the UK. The identification of risk factors that are allegedly predictive of offending and reoffending (especially by young people) has heavily influenced the criminal justice policies and practices of a number of first world countries, notably the UK, the USA and Australia. However, the robustness and validity of much 'artefactual' risk factor research (see Kemshall 2003) has recently come under sustained criticism for:

- Reductionism - e.g. over-simplifying complex experiences and circumstances by converting them to simple quantities, limiting investigation of risk factors to psychological and immediate social domains of life, whilst neglecting socio-structural influences;

- Determinism - e.g. characterising young people as passive victims of risk experiences with no ability to construct, negotiate or resist risk;

- Imputation - e.g. assuming that risk factors and definitions of offending are homogenous across countries and cultures, assuming that statistical correlations between risk factors and offending actually represent causal relationships, assuming that risk factors apply to individuals on the basis of aggregated data.

Two UK academics, Stephen Case and Kevin Haines, have been particularly forceful in their critique of risk factor research within a number of academic papers and a comprehensive polemic text entitled 'Understanding Youth Offending: Risk Factor Research, Policy and Practice'.

## References

Case, S.P. and Haines, K.R. (2009) Understanding Youth Offending: Risk Factor Research, Policy and Practice. Cullompton: Willan. http://www.willanpublishing.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781843923411

1. ^ Lenn Evan Goodman (2003), Islamic Humanism, p. 155, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195135806.