Sub Groups

Statement for AEBC Seminar 16/1/00

Professor Nick Pidgeon, Director, Centre for Environmental Risk, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia Norwich

Nick Pidgeon is a psychologist by training who joined the Centre for Environmental Risk (CER), as Professor of Environmental Sciences in May 1999. He has research interests in three broad areas. First, in the psychological and social processes underlying people's perception of risk and its communication, as well as psychological aspects of how people 'construct' preferences in answering risk valuation questions (e.g. contingent valuation tasks). Second, the human and organisational causes of major industrial accidents and the risk management approaches, such as incident reporting systems and improved safety cultures, for accident prevention in this domain. Third, in social science research methods, with a particular emphasis upon the use of qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research. He is also director of a 5-year major research programme, on the 'Public Understanding of Risk' to commence at UEA from 1 January 2001 supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

Completed reviews of research relevant to the seminar topic include a major overview of studies of risk perception and communication for the Royal Society in 1992, together with an edited volume (with David Okrent) in 1998 of the journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety on 'risk assessment versus risk perception'. Also an edited collection (forthcoming) with Paul Slovic and Roger Kasperson on 'social amplification of risk'. Relevant empirical studies include: for the EU (with Tom Horlick-Jones) on public perceptions of major accident hazards; for HSE (a) on public preferences for health and safety controls (with Graham Loomes and Mike Jones-Lee) (b) on using mental models for communicating about chemical risks in the workplace (with Simon Gerrard); finally, ongoing major projects for DETR/DoH on valuation of air pollution mortality and morbidity risks (again with Loomes/Jones-Lee), and for HSE on trust in HSE as a regulator.

Throughout my research - no doubt like much that will be presented by other colleagues at the seminar - emphasises the need to go beyond single disciplinary boundaries in order to understand public attitudes and discourse towards risk, and the way risk controversies do and do not arise. Such an interdisciplinary perspective also leads naturally to attempts to embed explanations of perceptions properly within the social and institutional context within which they arise. For example, the public responses to GM must be seen as a response in part to judgements about the likely future institutional performance of risk managers and regulators on the basis of past 'similar' models and evidence (viz BSE). Related work on the organisational pre-conditions to major failures of foresight and disasters shows a degree of public scepticism in institutional performance would not be unwarranted here. The currently topical case of rail safety - where we compared attitudes and discourse about rail safety in 1998 and early 2000 - would also illustrate this point clearly, and some of the reasons why consumer confidence in a system or technology can collapse very rapidly indeed. It follows that a key theoretical issue in the risk field, as Wynne and others have pointed out, is trust in institutions. Our own work confirms the work of others which emphasises the very complex and multi-faceted nature of trust and the relationships of this to both perceptions and to institutional performance(s). It follows also that simple quantitative trust scales do not capture the full complexities of what people understand as 'trust'.

Following on from the above, the empirical work at UEA takes an eclectic position. Methods should be seen not as valid in and of themselves, but valid for certain purposes. Although many disciplinary canons (e.g. within psychology or sociology) recognise this, in practice single methodological approaches dominate much of the field. The inevitable multi-faceted character of many risk perception issues and concepts - trust is one good example but not the only one - argues against taking any single methodological approach. A feature of our work then is the attempt to 'triangulate' between multiple methods - both quantitative and qualitative - to obtain insight onto the outputs of one from the other and vice versa. For example, traditional large-scale attitude surveys give 'broad brush' trends which are indeed of value in themselves, while interviews or group discussions give insight into phenomenological meaning (what and how people understand about a topic) or into discursive dynamics (how people argue in day to day conversation about a topic). In many circumstances all three will be needed to understand the evolution and maintenance of a risk issue. A feature of the new programme on Public Understanding of Risk at UEA will be an exploration of such mixed methodological approaches in novel and (hopefully) illuminating ways.

Three burning questions for the seminar:

How can we genuinely bridge the disciplinary fractures (theoretical and methodological) that exist in the field?

What is the proper role of social science for science risk policy: as purely observer or part-guide?

Will the vogue for stakeholder processes and public participation in the risk policy domain bring gains (and for whom) or unintended consequences in relation to the GM and food debate? i.e. what will work best and when and for whom, and what will not (within some set of evaluative criteria)?