Risk Communication

This book explains how to develop more effective risk communications using the Carnegie Mellon mental-model approach. Such communications are designed to contain, in readily usable form, the information that people need to make informed decisions about risks to health, safety, and the environment. The approach draws together methods from the natural and social sciences, providing a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration. It is demostrated with varied examples including electromagnetic fields, climate change, radon, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Health and safety risk issues such as AIDS, hazardous waste disposal, airline disasters, and health care policy frequently dominate the news and require a new level of sensitivity and expertise on the part of journalists. This volume focuses on a study of the trends in risk reporting and offers guidelines on how to report the dangers of these risks more accurately. It also examines the ethical implications of reporting risks to the public. This work will be of interest to those studying communication, specifically in the areas of ethics in journalism and public health and medical reporting.

These essays written from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, philosophy, and journalism deal with media coverage of science, medicine, technology, disaster, and hazards in the environment and suggest ways that journalists, policy makers, and citizens can work to correct problems inherent in this coverage. Nelkin's foreword examines images of science and technology as conveyed through the media and poses two questions that succeeding chapters address: Why is science writing so uncritical of science, and why are scientists so critical of the press?

Taking a broad view of organizational crisis, the authors synthesize a rich and diverse body of theory, research, and practice and apply it to every kind of crisis imaginable, from oil spills to nuclear disasters, airplane crashes, shuttle explosions, and corporate implosions such as Enron.

The crash of an Amtrak train near Baltimore, the collapse of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, the incident at Three Mile Island, and other large-scale technological disasters have provided powerful examples of the ways that communication practices influence the events and decisions that precipitate a disaster. These examples have raised ethical questions about the responsibility of writers within agencies, epistemological questions about the nature of representation in science, and rhetorical questions about the nature of expertise and experience as grounds for judgments about risk. In The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments, author Beverly Sauer examines how the dynamic uncertainty of the material environment affects communication in large regulatory industries. Sauer's analysis focuses specifically on mine safety, which provides a rich technical and historical context where problems of rhetorical agency, narrative, and the negotiation of meaning have visible and tragic outcomes. But the questions Sauer asks have larger implication for risk and safety: How does writing function in large regulatory industries? What can we learn from experience? Why is this experience so difficult to capture in writing? What information is lost when agencies rely on written documentation alone? Given the uncertainties, how can we work to improve communication in hazardous and uncertain environments? By exploring how individuals make sense of the material, technical, and institutional indeterminancies of their work in speech and gesture, The Rhetoric of Risk helps communicators rethink their frequently unquestioned assumptions about workplace discourse and the role of writers in hazardous worksites. It is intended for scholars and students in technical writing and communication, rhetoric, risk analysis and risk communication, as well as a wide range of engineering and technical fields concerned with risk, safety, and uncertainty.