Drowning ‘Truths’: Contrasting experiential-experts’ perceptions with official-experts drowning reports on Australia's hazardous coasts
Graphical abstract
Drawing on the experiential fishers' accounts, this figure shows how experiential-experts knowledge can be used to expand the application of the sandy beach safety principles to the context of rock fishing (i.e., how risk is known). It maps out experiential-experts’ drowning typology (green), official-experts drowning types (blue) and the importance of collective framings of risk (yellow) that reflect the safety principles of ‘how to avoid and respond to risk’. This includes contributing to the growing body of coastal risk literature that highlights the risk of bystander (i.e., collective) rescues, which, in this context, appears to be encouraging submerged, inexperienced fishers to regain access to the shore platforms.
Introduction
Hazardous rocky coasts are a top site worldwide for coastal fatalities [[1], [2], [3]]. Fatal drowning incidents often occur on shorelines characterized by steep cliffs with rock shelves that extend seaward from their base, termed shore platforms [4]. Over one-million Australian rock fishers enjoy casting from shore platforms in pursuit of large and diverse deep-water fish species (Fig. 1). In this context, the risk of drowning while rock fishing is mainly understood as an outcome of overtopping waves sweeping fishers off their feet and into the water [5]. This is because the act of casting from shore platforms often requires standing in locations where incoming wave energy dissipates [6]. Popular rock fishing locations also tend to be higher risk because deep water close to shore attracts larger fish species, which in turn attracts more fishers.
In Australia, rock fishing related drownings are a central issue of coastal safety, ranking in the highest three coastal activities that result in drowning, along with boating and swimming. Although we acknowledge that drowning does not always result in a fatality [7], this study is based on fatal drowning incidents recorded in the National Coronial Information Systems (NCIS) reports, hereafter termed ‘drownings’. Rock fishing is regularly said to be Australia's most deadly sport [8] because between 2004 and 2018, there were 164 reported rock fishing-related drownings [9]. In line with this framing of risk, for example, legislation was recently passed in the state of New South Wales (NSW) that made lifejackets mandatory for all rock fishers in certain drowning black spot councils [10]; this action was a governmental response to the large number of drownings and, as we demonstrate below, to a specific type of framing and understanding of risk and drowning along coasts in Australia. In much the same way, in 2018, Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) – Australia's chief organisation prompting coastal water safety – identified inexperienced fishers as a main safety target [9] in compliance with the Australian Water Safety Strategy (AWSS) drowning reduction targets [11]. These targets aim to reduce all coastal drownings by 50% by the year 2020. These types of changes in safety policy and governance makes understanding how fishers unintentionally enter the sea a particularly important consideration with ramifications for both decision-makers and coastal users.
Studies that have performed retrospective reviews of the NCIS drowning data typically deploy statistical analyses that prioritise national safety issues including, the identification of key groups or activities that are high-risk [[12], [13], [14]]. For rocky coasts, the NCIS data has been used to analyse where, when, and why rock fishers drown [9]. Despite the interest in fatalities, few analyses have considered ‘how’ rock fishers are portrayed as entering the sea in the NCIS. Furthermore, none have considered how closely official accounts align with fishers' perceptions, nor whether there are differences amongst experienced and inexperienced fishers. To address this gap, we analyse the similarities and differences between two experts' drowning accounts: one that is grounded in the perceptions of experiential-expert fishers and the other evident within official accounts collected by risk experts/officials (e.g., coroners, police) for the NCIS database. Expert fishers perceive risk and behave while official-experts interpret eye witnesses' accounts and medical evidence to compile their reports. Experienced fishers are considered noncertified ‘experiential-experts’, whose repeated first-hand experience with high-risk situations informs their expert perceptions [15]. Experiential-expertise is similar to a concept used in applied psychology termed ‘Naturalistic Decision Making’ (NDM), which also explains how experienced people make decisions and perform cognitively complex functions in demanding, real-world situations [16].
To understand how fishers' interpret the risk of drowning, 52 semi-structured interviews were conducted with a key aspect focused on ‘how’ fishers believe that fishers unintentionally enter the water. Interviews with fishers who have more than 3 years of fishing experience are considered ‘experts’ (n = 28) and were used to develop a drowning typology representing the different ways experiential-experts’ interpret how fishers typically enter the water. This expert drowning typology is compared with ‘how’ drownings are reported in the NCIS report's ‘incident details’. These reports are collated from official experts' reporting on a drowning hereafter termed, ‘official-experts’, which describe either the coroner's findings or eye-witness accounts recorded by the police. Although the authors of this study and NDM scholars would agree that there is no clear definition of ‘experiential-expertise’, three years of experience was chosen in this study to delineate experiential-expert from inexperienced fishers in order to devise a relatively evenly distributed sample of inexperienced (n = 46%) and expert (n = 54%) perceptions for comparison with official experts' accounts. Critically, neither the experiential-experts’ perceptions or official-experts’ reports are assumed to be ‘The Truth’, nor is either considered to be intrinsically ‘False’ or simply perceptions.
Contrasting experiential-experts’ perceptions with official-experts’ accounts draws on Cook and Overpeck [17] and Cook and Melo Zurita [18] argument that there is a growing need to extend consideration of how other forms of experts' knowledge can be used in the context of risk management. This is especially important given the questionable effectiveness of the transfer of scientific knowledge – by itself – to the public because it is unlikely to be successful in changing behaviour. The goal of this study is to accommodate the mix of assumptions that influence how experiential and official experts interpret risk in order to better understand how fishers are entering the sea and how their truths might be used to expand how we think about risk. More broadly, we hope this expert-expert comparison contributes new findings for coastal risk analysis and governance.
Section snippets
Framing drowning ‘truths’
Exploring the tension between two different expert interpretations of risk is informed by the growing body of research that recognises the importance of how societies choose to frame policy-making strategies and how knowledge (i.e., ‘truths’) influences decision-making [19]. Historically, Otway and Thomas [20] contended that risk can be understood as either a physical (i.e., quantifiable) or socially-constructed phenomenon. Each interpretation highlights dissimilar knowledges and assumptions
Study sites
Perception data was gathered from Randwick, New South Wales (NSW) and Bass Coast Shire, Victoria (VIC). These two council areas are considered ‘black spots’, which in the context of this analysis means that they have some of the largest numbers of rock fishing-related drownings on Australia's coasts [9] (Fig. 2). At each site, twenty-six fishers (n = 52) were interviewed between the months of September 2016 and March 2018 using semi-structured walk-along interviews.1
Results and discussion
The experiential-expert based rock fishing drowning typology revealed five ways that fishers' frame ‘how’ fishers enter the water and drown, with Table 1, Table 2 providing examples and noting the numbers of drownings associated with the different accounts. These include: 1) being ‘inexperienced’, 2) ‘panicking and running’ from waves, 3) ‘falling in’ while retrieving snagged lines or large fish, 4) ‘swimming back’ to the platform and attempting to regain access, and 5) unknown. The unknown
Conclusion
In this paper, we have analysed two expert drowning typologies: one that is grounded in fishers' experiential-expertise and the other in official-experts’ reporting of drownings in the NCIS. By framing risk through fishers' experiential-expertise, we have shown how experts' perceptions of high-risk behaviour can be linked to the NCIS drowning data while also demonstrating how such ‘truths’ are underpinned by practice-based knowledge rather than knowledge of physical risks. We argue that coastal
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Australian Research Council and Surf Life Saving Australia through the ARC-Linkage program (Grant: LP130100204).
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