Socio-technical Risk, Decisions and Values: A Narrative Approach
This research is a project forming part of the Social Contexts and Responses to Risk (SCARR) research network funded by the ESRC, and is being carried out at Cardiff University School of Psychology in collaboration with the School of Social Sciences also at Cardiff, and the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
This project emerges out of a desire to develop innovative methodological and conceptual approaches to understanding experiences of environmental risk in everyday lives. A current challenge in risk research is to develop methods to understand and represent the complex production of values, by publics and stakeholders, in the process of working through decisions around living with and managing risk. In the context of this project, environment is taken to include the vulnerable world of everyday life, thus expanding the definition to include the home and the workplace. The project focuses upon two case studies of UK communities living with a nuclear power station in their localities (Bradwell in Essex and Oldbury in Gloucestershire). Since the publication of the Energy White Paper of May 2007 the renewal of nuclear energy, and the attitudes of potential host communities, is an issue that is the subject of intense policy interest and debate. Taking a broadly narrative approach, the project is first exploring people’s values through the stories that they tell about living with risk. These narrative interviews are complemented by a Q-methodology exercise that is mapping discourses of nuclear power and risk at these two sites. The final stage of the project builds on these first two stages to develop a further investigation of the relationship between risk experience and decision-making in everyday life.
Contact: Peter Simmons
Visit the Understanding Risk website at: http://www.understanding-risk.org/
Visit the SCARR network website at: http://www.kent.ac.uk/scarr/