Perception and the Presentation of Self: Reflections from Fieldwork on Risk Authors Dr Noel SMITH is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP), Loughborough University. His research interests include social exclusion, poverty an

Abstract: The growth of sociological interest in how people perceive and experience everyday risk needs to be matched with more empirical research. This paper reflects on such a study, and discusses one of the methodological challenges this involved. The study adopts a narrative bio-graphical method (loosely defined) to examine participants ' decision-making in relation to their careers. To avoid prejudicing participants ' responses about the extent to which notions of risk impact on their worldviews, explicit reference to "risk " was withheld in the interviews. Participants were not preoccupied with risk and, ostensibly, tended to distance themselves from their roles as agents. However, their stories provided examples of decision-making and risk-awareness. The pa-per argues that participants ' presentation of self—or, in the context of the interviews, their narrative construction of identity—obscures their roles as life-planners. Thus, a challenge for empirical re-search of everyday risk is to disentangle how people identify and present themselves, and how they perceive themselves as agents in risk society