Grantee Research Project Results
The Effect of Information Materials on Risk Rankings
EPA Grant Number: U915166Title: The Effect of Information Materials on Risk Rankings
Investigators: Morgan, Kara M.
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
EPA Project Officer: Packard, Benjamin H
Project Period: January 1, 1997 through January 1, 2000
Project Amount: $102,000
RFA: STAR Graduate Fellowships (1997) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Fellowship - Risk Communication , Academic Fellowships , Ecological Indicators/Assessment/Restoration
Objective:
The objective of this research project is to learn about how lay participants incorporate narrative risk information, attribute-based risk information, and personal experience into risk-ranking judgments.
Approach:
Rankings are collected from participants using one of four different types of information materials. The four types of information materials are: (1) narrative-only; (2) table-only; (3) narrative and table; and (4) summary sheet, which contains narrative, and table, and three additional sections of text providing more detailed information about the risk. A within-condition comparison uses the average pair-wise correlation between the rankings within condition will be calculated to assess consistency, that is (i.e., how similar the rankings are across these participants). A bootstrap method is used to generate a distribution of differences in correlations to determine if the differences between the levels of agreement using the different information materials are significant. For between-condition analysis, one average ranking is produced to represent each condition, and these rankings are compared.