A Case Study of Health Risk Communication: What the Public Wants and What it Gets  

The task of informing the public about various health risks is fraught with many problems. It is essential to overcome them if risk communication is to be improved. In 1989, the National Research Council (NRC) released a report that is important for many reasons. In particular, it helped establish a conceptual framework for risk communication and identified a research agenda to improve risk communication practices. One area of need identified by the report was better use of case studies to understand, e.g., 'how people react to different types of messages and channels; [and] what their actual concerns, frustrations, and data needs are' with regard to particular health risks.

Trauth, Jeannette M. Franklin Pierce Law Center (1994). Articles>Risk Communication>Biomedical

Competing Conceptions of Risk

Risk issues are unarguably contentious. People evaluate risks in incompatible ways and propose conflicting proposals for mitigating or litigating risk issues. The sources of contention are multiple. Sometimes people differ because they have different information; sometimes they differ because they have incompatible interests. This paper addresses one of the more philosophical and systemic bases for differing opinions and approaches: The possibility that people have fundamentally or substantially different conceptions of risk. The philosophical basis for contention over risk is most evident in the scholarly and scientific literature. Experts who study risk or risk issues are more likely to develop well-defined, internally consistent conceptions of risk than members of the lay public. If distinct philosophical and linguistic presumptions underlie competing conceptions of risk, it should be possible to formulate the contentiousness over alternatives in terms of a principled philosophical debate, with implications for risk analysis, risk evaluation and risk communication.

Thompson, Paul B. and Wesley Dean. Franklin Pierce Law Center (1996). Articles>Risk Communication>Rhetoric

Testing the Role of Technical Information in Public Risk Perception  

Through experiments with simulated news stories about hazardous materials release, this study finds that providing technical detail about health effects may be less useful than keeping citizens current on the agency's strategies for dealing with problems and other behaviors by officials.

Johnson, Branden B., Peter M. Sandman and Paul Miller. Franklin Pierce Law Center (1992). Articles>Risk Communication>Technical Writing