Citation

Simpson J, Fougere G, McGee R. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2013; 10(5): 1647-1664.

Affiliation

Injury Prevention Research Unit, Department of Preventive & Social Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. jean.simpson@otago.ac.nz.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph10051647

PMID

23615453

Abstract

Young children being injured at home is a perennial problem. When parents of young children and family workers discussed what influenced parents' perceptions and responses to child injury risk at home, both "upstream" and "downstream" causal factors were identified. Among the former, complex and interactive facets of society and contemporary living emerged as potentially critical features. The "wicked problems" model arose from the need to find resolutions for complex problems in multidimensional environments and it proved a useful analogy for child injury. Designing dynamic strategies to provide resolutions to childhood injury, may address our over-dependence on 'tame solutions' that only deal with physical cause-and-effect relationships and which cannot address the complex interactive contexts in which young children are often injured.

Language: en