Sub Groups

A note by
Tom Horlick-Jones
(Cardiff University School of Social Sciences and Department of Operational Research/Centre for the Analysis of Risk & Regulation, London School of Economics & Political Science)

1. Recent research

My research is concerned with risk and practical reasoning. Within this work there are two main foci of activity: first, the study of interpretive practices associated with lay perception of risks; and second, the investigation of the roles played by risk in organisational settings, including the rise of risk thinking and uses of risk technologies. In both spheres of activity, I am interested in finding ways of applying social science knowledge in policy development: in the design of risk communication programmes and decision support techniques. My approach is essentially phenomenological, with an emphasis on patterns of naturally-occurring lived experience, on sense-making, and on the politics of risk-related situations. Although located within sociology, I am concerned about not only technocratic reductionism, but also social reductionism in the analysis of risk. During the last five years, my work has been supported by the ESRC, EU, HSE/ILGRA, HSE, BP Amoco and the Leverhulme Trust.

2. Methods

My preferred method for work on risk perception is currently the focus group, with selection and facilitation being informed by ethnographic insights. I draw a sharp distinction between focus groups, which I view as engineered social microcosms, and group interviews, which often are described as "focus groups". I am currently pre-occupied with developing methods for the analysis of accounts that constitute focus group talk, and with the structure of everyday talk about risk. This includes an examination of the role of arguments and logics in sense-making about risk issues. Other work has adopted perspectives and methods from discourse and conversation analysis.

I have also been involved in mixed-method work on risk perception that has utilised interviews and questionnaire surveys in addition to focus groups. I feel there is much of value in such approaches, although I retain a certain uneasiness about the use of 'triangulation' between distinct data sets.

A third area of risk perception work in which I have been involved has utilised a range of methods - textual analysis, focus groups and process tracing interviews - to examine media accounts of risk issues and associated media consumption practices.

My work on risk in organisational settings is essentially ethnographic in nature. I have been much involved in combining this work with an 'action' engagement with real world problem: using 'soft' decision support techniques called 'problem structuring methods' to endeavour to promote controlled and constructive negotiations between problem stakeholders. Other work in this area has been concerned with assembling a 'tool kit' of various decision methods and processes to address environmental risk decision-making problems.

3. Other approaches

My approach to risk perception work has many similarities with interpretive research, which draws on ethnographic traditions of parts of sociology and anthropology, in contrast to methods and approaches of the once-dominant work in the area that was psychological in nature. Of particular importance here is the methodological 'gap' between what people say they do, and what they do in practice. Questionnaire-based work, and, to some extent, interview techniques, seem to be particularly prone to difficulties in this respect. Having said that, all data is situated in some way, so the means to address the interpretation of data becomes critically important. There is, however, a serious danger of reifying risk (and related matters, for example trust) by over-zealous attempts to measure it, in ways that fail to capture its essential nature.

In addition, there is a matter of perspective. In my view much research in the area possesses an underlying instrumentalism which tends to treat recipients of risk information as either 'cognitive engines' or "cultural dopes": social agents dancing to the tune of a monolithic 'culture'. I suggest that a more satisfactory conceptualisation of these matters needs to take account of the active ways in which people can make sense of their worlds, and of the means they use to accomplish this task.

4. Research insights of relevance to the seminar

The following themes seem particularly promising:

a) a recognition of the ways in which what is ostensibly the 'risk object' can become associated with other issues and agendas;

b) investigation of the range of lay sense-making practices with respect to specific risk issues;

c) understanding the 'image' specificity of different risk issues;

d) a design-based and user-centred approach to risk communication; and

e) an approach to risk management decision-making that utilises processes designed to promote the interactive integration of a range of knowledges (soft and hard) and value commitments.