Abstract
In recent years public opinion polls and social surveys have come to be more widely used by the media, government, and private industry to track public sentiment regarding a variety of issues. Risk analysts are simultaneously beginning to rely on such data in the tracking of attitudes and opinions bearing on the acceptability of risks. This research seeks to demonstrate how social structural analysis may be used to enhance our understanding of trends in attitudes concerning the acceptability of risk as reflected in social surveys.
When social surveys are used to track trends in public sentiment, attitudes on the acceptability of risk are often presented as univariate distributions of key indicators, such as the favorability of nuclear energy over time. However, variations in such distributions may also reflect changes in methodological approach, social structural changes, and variation in social processes. By developing a social structural model of the trend, a modicum of separation is achieved, allowing the researcher to distinguish between some methodologically induced shifts, socially-based shifts, and genuine shifts in attitudes bearing on acceptability over time. The log-linear approach used here to model these data also allows for prediction of future trends, or the prediction of acceptability of risk for different population structures. By this method we are able to interpret survey research data on the public acceptability of risk in more comprehensive and effective ways.
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Rogers, G.O. (1985). On Determining Public Acceptability of Risk. In: Whipple, C., Covello, V.T. (eds) Risk Analysis in the Private Sector. Advances in Risk Analysis, vol 220. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2465-2_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2465-2_37
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