Professional judgement in the assessment of risk: is there a role for systemic practice?

Risk assessment is an example of professional decision‐making pared to its stark essentials. Political pressures towards accountability and the need for defensible decisions encourage a ‘tick‐box’ approach to risk assessment, but this can create unrealistic expectations of certainty. In practice, as technological approaches produce ever more complex formal tools for assessing risk, their effectiveness remains dubious while our human decision‐making apparatus is marginalized. This article examines whether we should respect our ability to apprehend complex multi‐stranded narrative realities intuitively, with the hope that such intuitions might contribute to professional decision‐making. This idea is explored with reference to a case study.     

How the rich (and happy) get richer (and happier): relationship of core self-evaluations to trajectories in attaining work success

In this study, the authors linked core self-evaluations to job and work success. Utilizing a dynamic design from participants in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY79), core self-evaluations were hypothesized to predict individuals' intercepts (starting levels of success), and their growth trajectories (slope of individuals' success over time) with respect to job satisfaction, pay, and occupational status. Results indicated that higher core self-evaluations were associated with both higher initial levels of work success and steeper work success trajectories. Education and health problems that interfere with work mediated a portion of the hypothesized relationships, suggesting that individuals with high core self-evaluations have more ascendant jobs and careers, in part, because they are more apt to pursue further education and maintain better health.     

Capitalizing on one's advantages: role of core self-evaluations

The authors examined (a) whether core self-evaluations in adolescence and young adulthood predict income at midlife and (b) whether people with positive core self-evaluations are more likely to capitalize on advantages resulting from family socioeconomic status and academic achievement, resulting in even higher levels of income at midcareer. The sample consisted of participants from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a national probability sample that first surveyed participants in 1979. The authors found that core self-evaluations and family socioeconomic status and academic achievement predict income and that, furthermore, high core self-evaluations enhance the benefits derived from these factors. Overall, it appears that individuals with positive core self-evaluations are particularly adept at translating early advantages into later economic success.