Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
we very much wanted a fi gure, and she was fairly vague, but said, well
the normal is approximately 1 to 600, but varies a lot. Because I think
that otherwise you could easily have a hang up on fi gures and just see
everything as a number, but now, it was more like us understanding that
okay, it can happen and it can not happen and this depends on a lot of
reasons that you cannot always understand. So I think she did it very
well.
INTERVIEWER:
How did you think about the fi gure, was it high or low?
ANN:
Well fi rst I thought it wasn't so high, one chance on 208, I thought that
sounded little. But then, when she said that the average was 1 to 600 at
my age, then I realized that I had a probability that was three times as
high, ehh and then when I talked to a friend, who had also done this and
had one chance on 3,000, then I felt like, goodness, what an enormous
risk I have compared to, ehh, so it is so strange because it is so relative,
but at the same time it could have said 1 to 20 I suppose, or 1 to 50, so
thinking more pragmatically it feels as if 0.5 per cent probability is fairly
little. And if it concerned anything else, if somebody told me there is a
0.5 per cent probability that you will miss your plane tomorrow, then I
would have said, okay, my God, how good that I will not miss the plane.
But when it comes to something important like this, it feels as [sigh]
why couldn't it have been 0.05 or something like that, because it is so
important.
We can see that Ann is fi rst of all expressing her strong feelings of being
surprised, it had never crossed her mind that she could be at risk, and her
emotional reactions of sadness. She is trying to understand the risk score as
high or low when refl ecting on the risk fi gure, 208, also talking about this
in per cent and even as a fi fty-fi fty chance. She compares the fi gure with
the average for women her age as well as with the risk score of another
woman she knows. In doing this, she oscillates between talking about the
risk as low and high. She also comments on the midwife and the way she
presented the information about the risk score as being very good. The high
risk message was terrible, but the midwife was nice. Finally, she concludes
that she wished it was lower, because this particular situation, expecting
a baby, is so important, not a trivial thing such as missing a plane. This
example illuminates the way the women in their accounts move between
different ways of making sense of the high risk information, which we will
look at in more detail in the next sections.
The risk score as high or low
All women talked about
how diffi cult
it was to understand the risk score.
Particularly the younger women, under 35, said they could not remember
that they had ever received any information beforehand about the risk
assessment, and were somehow taken by surprise. (Albeit all the women had
