The CARE panel is a research project which aims to follow 10 000 backcountry riders over 10 years. Our aim is to generate knowledge that will help people make better decisions in avalanche terrain, and to reduce the risk of avalanche accidents.
Background
In order to make it easier to make good decisions in avalanche terrain, we need to understand how people make decisions, and why we sometimes make mistakes when we tour in the backcountry. We also need to understand how people learn to make decisions. This means that we need to understand how experience – from touring, avalanche education, and accidents – affect us.
Most studies on decision-making in avalanche terrain rely on, what researchers call, cross-sectional analyses. A cross-sectional study looks at behavior, or decisions, at one point in time. We can learn quite a bit from cross-sectional studies, but there is a lot that we cannot learn. For example, a number of studies (e.g., Marengo et al., 2017: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2016.12.005) find that people, who have experienced an avalanche, are more willing to take risk. From a cross-sectional study, this may lead us to draw the conclusion that avalanche accidents make people feel invulnerable and therefore more risk-seeking. However, it is very plausible that people who are relatively willing to take risk, are also more likely to be involved in an accident. These people may actually have become less willing to take risk after the accident!
We want you!
To gain knowledge that can help people make better decisions in the mountains, and thereby to reduce the risk of avalanche accidents, we need to learn more about how backcountry riders deal with risk, and how knowledge and experience develop over We need to learn from all the different people who travel in avalanche terrain – novices and experts, young and old, women and men.
The CARE panel is currently active in Norway, and in Sweden. In Sweden, we cooperate with Naturvårdsverket (the Swedish EPA).
What it means to participate
CARE will send out emails with links to surveys to registered participants a few times per season. We may also invite you to participate in other types of studies that focus on avalanches.
It is voluntary to participate and you do not have to answer any of our emails.
The information that you give to us will be stored at UiT – the Arctic University of Norway, in accordance with regulations and guidelines from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD). All data is treated confidentially, and we will never forward identifiable information to third parties. Your data will be encoded and stored securely with to-factor authentication access. We will keep the data until 2034. After this the data will be anonymized.
All data collected by CARE will only be used for scientific research. In order to contribute to good scientific practice, we will make anonymized data available to other researchers (for example via UiT Open Research Data). We will only publish completely anonymized data. It will never be possible to identify individual persons from the data.
As long as it is possible for us to identify you in the data, you have the right to ask us to delete, correct, or send you the information that we have on you in the panel. You can do this by contacting us via email. You do not have to provide a reason for your wishes. You are also welcome to contact us if you have questions about your data, this study, or other studies by CARE. You can contact either Audun Hetland (audun.hetland@uit.no) or Andrea Mannberg (andrea.mannberg@uit.no)
If you have questions about your rights as a participant or have comments on how we collect and/or store data, you can contact NSD –Norsk senter for forskningsdata AS (Norway) at email: personverombudet@nsd.no or phone: +4755 58 21 17. You can also contact Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten (IMY) www.imy.se in Sweden.
White Heat Project 