3.3.3 Quantification and examples of hazardous events past 5 years
We sought to quantify any hazardous events experienced in the last 5 years (Fig. 2). For all types of scares/incidents, most have not experienced any adverse events. A separate figure for UK participants only was created but the trend of answers remained unchanged (Supplementary Material, Fig. 2).
Recurring words were “worry”, “concern”, “anxiety”, “paranoid”, “avoid”. For instance, one respondent responded “I have this paranoid habit to check the gas multiple times a day, before leaving the house, before going to bed or right in the middle of a movie just in case I forgot. When I’m out I always wonder if I triple checked that the gas was off so I have this anxiety to come back to a blown up house…not fun!”.
In terms of the incidence, 32.2%, 14.8%, 34.5%, 18.5% of participants have experienced at least one food incident, gas incident, gas scare, and work scare the past 5 years respectively (Supplementary Material, Table 1). When considering only UK respondents, the percentages of at least one experience were similar at 29.7%, 14.7%, 34.8%, 15.3% in the order of food incident, gas incident, gas scare, and work scare (Supplementary Material, Fig. 1). Examples of hazardous events are provided in Table 2.