Four years ago Jaime Gilden was a senior at Libby High School. On Wednesday, the recent Montana State University graduate was back home to present the preliminary findings of an asbestos risk survey she and Dr. Colleen Moore conducted earlier this year.

The data collected from the survey was used for Gilden’s senior thesis and was funded by a grant from the Idea Network of Bio Medical Research Excellence for rural health research projects.

The research examined resident’s asbestos risk perceptions and the presentation was primarily what Moore called the “punch you in the nose” results that stuck out to the researchers. Over the next year, they will continue working to get the data ready for publication, albeit in different locations.

“We are currently in the middle of data analysis,” said Gilden. “So the results we’re going to be showing today are pretty preliminary, they’re just what we thought was striking.”

The presentation began by looking at what risk is and how the Environmental Protection Agency defines risk and determines what is considered acceptable. Risk assessment is often a balance of magnitude and probability. “Usually the EPA uses a 10 percent increase over base rate, that’s the dose the EPA is going to say is harmful, anything below that is safe and anything above that is harmful,” said Moore. 

The study wasn’t about quantifying risk assessment, rather an analysis of how people perceive risk.

“We studied risk perceptions, which is pretty much how people think and feel about asbestos risk,” Gilden said. “This can come from numerical risk assessment, but it doesn’t have to. It often comes from people’s experiences of living in the community, getting diagnosed with asbestosis, getting your house cleaned, working in the mine, just existing in the community in general.”

She said those factors are as important as objective risk assessments because they determine the steps community members will make to proactively protect their health and environment. And subsequently, how the public feels and views whether or not the community is safe after cleanup measures have been taken. 

Any number of factors can affect the public’s perception of the asbestos risks involved with living in the community of Libby. 

Demographic variables such as sex, being screened for asbestos issues or not and being diagnosed with asbestos-related disease were just some of the factors considered.

The researchers acknowledged those surveyed tended to be advanced in age and they would have liked to get some younger respondents, but for a convenience sample it provided a good representation. One member of the audience at Wednesday’s presentation gave an example of a difference in views older people may hold.

“When you get to my age you don’t care, what the hell is the difference,” he quipped.

Gilden said their survey showed no difference in risk perception between people who have had their houses cleaned and between new residents and multi-generational ones, the latter of which she found somewhat surprising.

“We found that trust, negative emotion and uncertainty all had a significant relationship to risk perception both in the literature and in our study,” Gilden said.

Although the expected responses to those three variables may seem obvious, they weren’t exactly what the researchers expected. 

In their findings, the more trust a person has in cleanup agencies the lower their risk of perception. Negative emotions led to a higher perceived risk and uncertainty went against the grain of what most literature states.

“What we found was the opposite,” said Gilden. “It might make sense in our community because we have been dealing with this so long that that the more knowledge you have people are starting to come a lot closer to the truth of asbestos risk.”

How their findings will be used isn’t a real concern for the researchers, their project was mainly for the sake of science itself.

The findings from their project will add to the larger body of work on how different agencies perform risk assessments, which have changed over time from just such research. 

“The public needs to know their feelings about risk count,” said Moore.

Gilden was pleased with the substantial data they assembled and analyzed. “That we got real, legitimate exciting results at all was my biggest surprise. I wasn’t really expecting to get as much out of it as we did,” she said. “We have a lot of exciting data that really matches well with the literature.”

Next fall, Gildean will attend Ohio State University and pursue her Ph.D  in the field of decision psychology dealing with health and environment. “I don’t have an exact plan in research yet, but I assume it’s either going to be in climate change or the tobacco industry,” she said.