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obvescanje javnosti o znanstvenih dosezkihEcological Risk Perception and Ranking
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This dissertation reports on a series of studies on perceptions of environmental hazards. These studies are tied together by the goal of improving the quality of public participation in environmental policy making through a method for eliciting ranked lists of health, safety, and environmental hazards from jury-like groups of laypeople. This method uses both holistic and multiattribute procedures to help individuals clarify their perceptions of hazards and the relative importance of characteristic s of those hazards. Previous studies evaluating this method for use with health and safety hazards have provided support for the validity and replicability of resulting rankings. However, for this risk-ranking method to be useful in realistic risk-management settings it must address a broader range of outcomes, including impacts on the environment. The three papers that compose this dissertation extend the risk-ranking method into the domain of environmental risk management. Each paper answers several questions related to this overall goal. The first question posed is, “What information must people know in order to make considered judgments about the relative riskiness of various hazards?” There is a broad existing literature on public perceptions of human health and safety hazards. However, the body of literature on perceptions of environmental risks is considerably smaller. Paper 1 reports results from two psychometric studies of environmental risk perceptions. The first identifies six factors related to public perceptions of environmental risks: ecological impacts, human impacts, human benefits, aesthetic impacts, scientific understanding, and controllability. This study extends the literature by using a new set of attributes, a new set of hazards, and allowing the factors to be correlated across the hazards. The second addresses a common criticism of the psychometric method by using both aggregate-level and individual-level analyses. Results indicate that factors from the traditional aggregate-level analysis do a relatively good job of explaining individuals’ ecological riskiness judgments. Furthermore, the analytical methods used allow for investigation of between-participant variations in perceptions and riskiness judgments and ii highlight the importance of unconfounding the level of analysis (aggregate versus disaggregate) from the focus of analysis (explaining differences among risks versus explaining differences among participants). Področje: VARSTVO OKOLJA VKLJUČEVANJE ŠIRŠE JAVNOSTI V PROCES ODLOČANJA O REŠEVANJU EKOLOŠKIH PROBLEMOV V razvitem svetu se je v preteklih desetletjih pojavila potreba po celovitem pristopu k reševanju ekoloških problemov v povezavi s smotrno rabo energije in celostnim upravljanjem z okoljem.
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