Exploring parental risk perception regarding childhood unintentional home injuries: A cross-sectional study

Introduction: While previous studies on childhood injury focused mainly on the relationship between parents' preventive behavior and its determinants, knowledge about parental risk perception that can help to develop, implement, and evaluate successful interventions to prevent childhood unintentional home injuries is still limited. The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of parental risk perception regarding unintentional home injuries of children under six years of age.

Method: A convenience sample of 469 parents, residing in Germany, completed a web-based questionnaire assessing factors potentially associated with parental risk perception on the child, parental, and environmental level. Descriptive statistics, p for trend, and Spearman's Rho correlation coefficients were calculated.

Results: Key factors influencing parental risk perception included children's sex, age, migrant status, emotionality, and injury risk as well as parents' parenting style and external locus of control. While parental risk perception was positively associated with children's injury risk, the analyses showed no associations between parental risk perception and parents' preventive behavior.

Conclusions: Our findings add to a better understanding of parental risk perception, provide practical implications for injury prevention, and indicate that the relationship between parental risk perception and parents' preventive behavior is based on a complex mechanism which is possibly moderated by parents' locus of control.

Practical applications: The identified key factors help to assess parental risk perception more accurately. Therefore, they should be considered in the development of tailored interventions to prevent unintentional home injuries of children, for instance, by targeting specific groups of parental risk perception.