In 1980, a group of scientists from national laboratories, universities, and other research organizations gathered informally in a series of meetings to consider the state of research on risks to health, safety, and the environment. Each scientist had conducted research on the subject. All felt that the traditional disciplines and professional societies to which they belonged were neither ade quate nor appropriate for addressing the extraordinarily complex problems of assessing the risks inherent in modern society. The con sensus of the group was that a new society was needed to address these problems in a scientific and objective way. From these initial meetings, the Society for Risk Analysis was formed The major aims of the Society for Risk Analysis, as stated in its constitution, are • to promote knowledge and understanding of risk analysis techniques and their applications; • to promote communication and interaction among those engaged in risk analysis; and • to disseminate risk analysis information and promote the advancement of all aspects of risk analysis. Members of the Society are drawn from a variety of disciplines, including the health sciences, engineering, the physical sciences, the humanities, and the behavioral and social sciences. An import ant function of the Society is the annual meeting, at which var ious aspects of risk analysis are discussed. The first annual meet ing, represented by this volume, was the International Workshop on the Analysis of Actual vs.

Public attention has focused in recent years on an array of technological risks to health, safety, and the environment. At the same time, responsibilities for technological risk as sessment, evaluation, and management have grown in both the public and private sectors because of a perceived need to anticipate, prevent, or reduce the risks inherent in modem society. In attempting to meet these responsibilities, legislative, judicial, regulatory, and private sector institutions have had to deal with the extraordinarily complex problems of assessing and balancing risks, costs, and benefits. The need to help society cope with technological risks has given rise to a new intellectual endeavor: the social and behavioral study of issues in risk evaluation and risk management. The scope and complexity of these analyses require a high degree of cooperative effort on the part of specialists from many fields. Analyzing social and behavioral issues requires the efforts of political scientists, sociologists, decision analysts, management scientists, econ omists, psychologists, philosophers, and policy analysts, among others.

The study of risk perception started when experts in these matters figured out that common people often disagreed about how they envisage risk, even in how people observed that risk. There are many theories about risk perception. Some are exclusively related to risk perception while others are adaptations from perception theories. Many of these theories date back to last century, others are more recent. Chapter One of this book discusses the reasons there are many different theories of risk perception. Chapter Two studies community vulnerability in risk analysis task using multi-source data statistics. Chapter Three offers a thorough analysis of risk perception and psychosocial vulnerability in a health context, from a theoretical perspective, and based on current scientific evidence, in order to open research lines for both of these constructs, both separately and collectively. Chapter Four establishes a relationship between the consumption of drugs like cannabis, cocaine and designer drugs in young university and non-university populations with the young people's perception of risks associated with such consumption. Chapter Five provides an analysis of consumers' choice of pay television and car insurance services based on the perceived risk model.