Risk Perception and Request for Information About Radiological Risks in the Health Area

Research by cognitive psychologists has demonstrated that when laypersons make estimates of risks do not merely calculate in terms of probabilistic information. People tend to construe the risk in accordance with other schema. Lay people use a broad definition of risk when making their judgements about which ones are of the most concern to them. Another topic of increasing interest within risk-perception research is the trust and credibility of the sources of risk information and communication. This interest is closely related to the increasing social demand for reliable and valid information about the risks to which society is exposed. In fact, several regulations and laws have been developed in an effort to respond to this social demand. This paper presents some of the key findings of a comparative LatinAmerican study on radiological risk perception in the health area. A questionnaire was distributed to outpatient samples from eleven Latin-American countries. A list of 22 risks was evaluated on two rating scales. The questionnaire also address the role of information as a means of feeling safe, who should inform the public about radiological risks, and what kind of information the public would like to receive. 1.Introduction Understanding public perceptions of risk is increasingly considered to be important in order to make sound policy decisions. Psychologists and other social scientists have shown how individuals judge and evaluate hazards related to working conditions, private activities, technological developments, global ecological changes, and so on. The main issues are the subjective concepts underlying risk judgements, the determinants of perceived risk magnitude, and differences among societal groups or cultures. The “psychometric paradigm” developed by Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein [1,2,3,4,5] was a landmark in research about public attitudes toward risks. Lay people use a broad definition of risk when making their judgements about which ones are of the most concern to them. This incorporates a number of qualitative characteristics . Slovic et al. [2] identified and analysed several characteristics of this kind using factor analysis and found that they could be resolved into three factors: 1) the dreadfulness of risks, 2) the degree of knowledge of and familiarity with the hazard, 3) the number of exposed people. Several studies repeated the approach by Slovic et al., [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Some studies produced a roughly equivalent structure, at least for factors 1 and 2 [6,7,8,9,10,12]. The original proponents of the “psychometric paradigm” have developed more sophisticated approaches that include the influence of factors such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, worldviews, and so on. Although the results were inconsistent, there are frequently some differences related to gender, age, socio-economic, and educational level. Since then some studies were also carried out related to specific hazards, especially on those derived from nuclear energy, and from radiation sources in general [14,15,16]. An interesting line of research, derived from “psychometric paradigm” was the replication of the original study by Slovic et al. in other countries. One aim was to obtain comparable results among countries. What guided these comparative attempts was a mixture of goals, first, to test general theory and second, to generate a body of exploratory new knowledge of