Risk communication
Risk communication is a complex cross-disciplinary academic field that is part of risk management and related to fields like crisis communication. The goal is to make sure that targeted audiences understand how risks affect them or their communities by appealing to their values.
Risk communication is particularly important in disaster preparedness, public health, and preparation for major global catastrophic risk. For example, the impacts of climate change and climate risk effect every part of society, so communicating that risk is an important climate communication practice, in order for societies to plan for climate adaptation. Similarly, in pandemic prevention, understanding of risk helps communities stop the spread of disease and improve responses.
Risk communication deals with possible risks and aims to raise awareness of those risks to encourage or persuade changes in behavior to relieve threats in the long term. On the other hand, crisis communication is aimed at raising awareness of a specific type of threat, the magnitude, outcomes, and specific behaviors to adopt to reduce the threat.
Risk communication in food safety is part of the risk analysis framework. Together with risk assessment and risk management, risk communication aims to reduce foodborne illnesses. Food safety risk communication is an obligatory activity for food safety authorities in countries, which adopted the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures.
Risk communication also exists on a smaller scale. For instance, the risks associated with personal medical decisions have to be communicated to that individual along with their family.
Types
Risk communication takes place on different scales, of which have different features and methods.Community risk communication
Risk communication on a community-wide scale mainly falls into specific categories. Some of the most well-studied areas of risk communication are climate change, nutrition, and natural disasters like floods.With the rise of COVID-19 in 2019, risk communication strategies utilized by governments to their communities were heavily critiqued. In the modern day, most people in groups get their information from the internet before anything else, so the sending of risk communication messages has methodologically changed.
Individual risk communication
One of the most common causes for the enactment of risk communication is medical-based personal issues. In a 2015 study, risk communication to people who had family members with dementia took place, and a model was developed that heavily features shared decision-making processes. In these cases where families of patients are involved, there is no general message that is sent out to the public. Instead, what often happens is that an intervention takes place between the medical experts and the family.Theories
One major area of theorization in academic risk communication research explores how the attitudes and predispositions of individuals can influence their engagement with information and messaging related to risks. This research direction typically adapts theories from social psychology to risk-specific communication contexts, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior or the Heuristic-Systematic Model. Research in this area tends to span a wide variety of risk or hazard contexts, including environmental health risks, environmental hazards, climate change-related risks, cancer risks, and infectious disease risks.Risk Information Seeking & Processing Model
Within risk communication research, the risk information seeking & processing model hypothesizes that seven factors affect how individuals will seek and process information about risks. Per Griffin et al., those seven factors are:; 1. Individual characteristics
; 2. Informational subjective norms
; 3. Hazard characteristics
; 4. Affective response to risk
; 5. Information sufficiency
; 6. Perceived Information Gathering Capacity
; 7. Relevant channel beliefs
The RISP model and its factors have been tested across a variety of risk contexts. A meta-analysis from Yang et al. generally supported the model's expectations, although they found that a reduced model with only two variables - composed of individual's existing knowledge on the risk and their subjective normative expectations around seeking information about it - explained a fairly substantial level of variance. Variations of the original RISP model have been tested empirically in risk communication research, such as the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model, the Framework of Risk Information Seeking, the Reduced Risk Information Seeking Model, and the Augmented Risk Information Seeking Model. These variations generally follow the underpinning theoretical guidance of the original RISP model, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Heuristic-Systematic Model of Information Processing, but make various variable-related changes when testing the model empirically.
Social Amplification of Risk Framework
The social amplification of risk framework (SARF) is another theory in risk communication. The SARF was developed to link the technical assessment of risk risk information is transmitted in some manner through some channel to public audiences, then 2) society responds to that risk information.Methods
Risk communication and community engagement
Risk communication and community engagement is a method that draws heavily on volunteers, frontline personnel and on people without prior training in this area. The World Health Organization advocated for this approach during the early recommendations for public health mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic.Substantive harm analysis
Another way to do risk communication analysis is to test the risks. Specifically, testing on the four main types of harm outlined by Löfstedt. These four types of harm, in relation to risk communication, are death, illness or injury, lack of resources, and injury to social status. The next step is then to test those risks of harm in three different fields to get a sense of the overall scope of the possible harm.Challenges
Problems for risk communicators involve how to reach the intended audience, how to make the risk comprehensible and relatable to other risks, how to pay appropriate respect to the audience's values related to the risk, how to predict the audience's response to the communication, etc. A main goal of risk communication is to improve collective and individual decision making.Some experts coincide that risk is not only enrooted in the communication process but also it cannot be dissociated from the use of language. Though each culture develops its own fears and risks, these construes apply only by the hosting culture. These differences stem from epistemological barriers, as well as social construction ones. When there are varying community-based beliefs in a situation, the importance of the risk at hand is also varied, as different communities have different perceptions of how impactful a result might be.