Are all risk perceptions created equal? Comparing general risk assessments and specific risk assessments associated with climate change

ABSTRACT

For policy-making to address public risk perceptions effectively, policy-makers must have a clear understanding of the nature of public risks. Public opinion polls regularly solicit perceptions of risk toward a variety of topics. These assessments, though, tend to be general with no specificity offered for a nuanced interpretation. Yet, there is good reason to assume that risk perceptions are not based on the same criteria. If true, policy-makers may be unable to address risks adequately without a better understanding of the drivers of risk perceptions. This project focuses on two primary research questions: (1) Does the public weigh the risk associated with global climate change differently in specific sub-domains? (2) If so, which climate change sub-domains are various members of the public most concerned about when offering a general assessment of global climate change risk? We assess public risk perceptions of climate change in three sub-domains—public health, economic development, and environment—and find that two of the three sub-domains are predictors of a general assessment of risk.

KeyWords:

• public risk assessment
• risk perceptions
• climate change
• policy-making

Funding

This material is based on research conducted by the Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy in The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University under award NA03OAR4310164 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the Department of Commerce.

Notes

¹Efficacy has also been found to predict risk perceptions in diverse issue domains such as nanotechnology (Anderson et al. 2013) and HIV in Kenya (Tenkorang and Maticka-Tyndale 2014).

²The national public survey used a national random sample conducted by telephone from July 13 to August 10, 2004. The phone numbers were provided by Survey Sampling International (SSI), and the survey was administered by a professional CATI provider.

³The GOLOGIT simultaneously estimates all of the equations. This leads to results that differ slightly from those found if the different levels are modeled separately as binary outcomes (Williams 2006).

⁴Additional information concerning the variables used in these analyses, including the specific questions used to build indexes, can be found in Appendix Tables A1 and A2.

⁵This general pattern is similarly found in the general assessment model, but it includes one additional ordered category, going up to Level 4.

⁶To simplify the reporting of the results, we simply indicate which levels were significantly different. Specific coefficient estimates and standard errors are available on request.

⁷As suggested by a helpful reviewer, we estimated the model without ecological values to ensure that the influence of environmental risk was not being accounted for by ecological values. The results of this analysis are substantively similar to those presented. Environmental risk was still statistically insignificant, although the p-value did improve to .571. These results are available on request.