Foxes caught in the same snare: a methodological review of social radon studies

Abstract

Mitigating risk from exposures to indoor radon is a critical public health problem confronting many countries worldwide. In order to ensure effective radon risk management based on social scientific evidence, it is essential to reduce scientific uncertainty about the state of social methodology. This paper presents a review of methodological (best) practices, and sensitivity to bias, in research on public attitudes and behaviours with regards to radon risks. Using content analysis, we examined characteristics of research design, construct measurement, and data analysis. Having identified certain challenges based on established and new typologies used to assess methodological quality, our research suggests that there is a need for attention to (limitations of) cross-sectional design, representative and appropriate sampling, and a pluralist approach to methods and analysis. Furthermore, we advocate for more comparative research, rigorous measurement and construct validation. Lastly, we argue that research should focus on behavioural outcomes to ensure effective radon risk management. We conclude that for any field to thrive it is crucial that there is methodological reflexivity among researchers. Our recommendations serve as a useful guide for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and enhance the rigor of social methodology in their field.

Keywords:

• radon
• methodological review
• health behaviour
• public attitudes
• methodological recommendations

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Johanne Longva at the NMBU library for her help with the development of the search protocol. This project has received funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2019–2020 under grant agreement No 900009, as well as the Research Council of Norway, grant nr313070 and 223268.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An important pathway of radon to the atmosphere are the NORM (naturally occurring radioactive materials) residues. We thus initially conducted a wider search, the findings of this search fall beyond the scope of the present article. The NORM articles unrelated to indoor radon were excluded in the full text screening stage. The full search strategy can be found in appendix 3.

2 There are several articles in which more than one quantitative, qualitative or a combination of both are used, as such the number of methods in higher than the number of articles.

3 https://www.radonorm.eu/

4 First Decade: 1987-1999 1998, Second Decade: 2000-2010 1999-2009, Third Decade: 2011 2010-2020