IRG-3: Risk Perception Group, 

The IRG-3 risk perception group aims to use mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to study the views and beliefs about emerging nanotechnologies by multiple parties, by which we mean people in numerous social locations—nanoscale scientists and engineers, nano risk assessment experts, regulators, industry, NGOs or other social action groups, and members of the public who differ by gender, race/ethnicity, class, occupation, education, and age. In 2007-08, researchers in IRG-3 RP performed work in the main areas detailed below.

IRG 3 comprises: Barbara Herr Harthorn , PI and Group Leader, Nick Pidgeon , Group Co-Leader (Cardiff), Tee Rogers-Hayden (University of East Anglia, UK), Terre Satterfield , Group Co-Leader (University of British Columbia) . Team members: Joseph Conti, Tyronne Martin, Alexis Ostrowski, Susan Stonich, Karl Bryant (formerly UCSB, now SUNY-New Paltz), Joe Summers (formerly UCSB, now Mount Holyoke),  Christian Beaudrie (University of British Columbia), Milind Kandlikar (University of British Columbia)

IRG-3: Risk Perception. Expert Judgments about Nanotechnologies’ Benefits and Risks Harthorn (Harthorn, Satterfield, Bryant, Pidgeon, Beaudrie, Martin, Ostrowski, Summers)  

Study 1: Nanoscale scientists and engineers

After extensive interview protocol development and pretesting in 2006, the UCSB team has completed and transcribed 16 90-minute expert interviews in California, and is currently working to complete an additional 5. Over the same period, the UBC team has completed 7 comparable interviews in Canada, and will complete another 3 shortly.  This will result in an overall sample of 30 scientists, 20 US (Calif) and 10 Canadian. We have completed extensive preliminary analysis of the US interviews using NVivo, focusing on cross-disciplinary comparisons, conceptualization of the nano scientific and technological fields, and possible expert attenuation effects. We have done a preliminary analysis of the Canadian data looking primarily at nano risk object characteristics. Preliminary findings indicate that nomenclature and definitional issues are pervasive. Our data strongly indicate that ‘nanoscience’ and ‘nanotechnology’ are contested domains for the majority of scientists and engineers we interviewed. These issues are particularly evident in scientists’ and engineers’ assessments of nanoscience/nanotechnology as new/not new and risky/not risky in both the present and in projected future contexts. In addition, there seem to be several different forms of expert risk attenuation in evidence, although the upstream context and scientific uncertainty of near-term hazards make assessment complex but potentially crucial. Preliminary analysis indicates that there is likely a pattern of risk attribution outside one’s own discipline. The UBC team is also preparing a web survey to extend (and validate) the interview data.

CNS-UCSB Director Barbara Herr Harthorn leads graduate fellows in a Working Group 3 meeting

Study 2: Nanotoxicologists

We are also conducting a similar study, using a modified protocol, with experts whose work focuses on possible toxicities of nano materials. So far, the UCSB team has completed 2 interviews in California. In concert with the UBC team, we anticipate completing another 10-13 faculty interviews, focusing on the West Coast and Texas in the next 6 months. Preliminary nanotoxicologist interviews indicate likely sharp demarcation from those engaged in basic and applied science and engineering, for instance in views about nanomaterials and risk. This work builds on the foundational work of Satterfield’s collaborator, Paul Slovic, on toxicological assumptions of experts and lay persons.

In conjunction with our nanotoxicologist research, and to help address ongoing public and other requests for summary data on nanotoxicology, chemists Ostrowski and Martin have been working on developing suitable search terms and characterizing the extant English language literature on nanotoxicology, using SciFinder and other web resources. They have documented a large array of publication sources (500+) for the 2000+ articles on toxic properties of nano materials through Dec 2007. They are characterizing the publications according to specific attention to several key issues (type of nano materials under study, in vivo/in vitro analysis methods, exposure pathways under study, etc.). We plan to submit these findings as a short letter or comment to a nano materials journal in 2008.

IRG-3: Risk Perception. Public Participation in Nanotechnology R&D: Deliberation Research (Harthorn, Pidgeon, Bryant, Rogers-Hayden, Satterfield, Summers)

The comparative deliberations in California and the UK were completed in February 2007, transcriptions by April 2007, and analysis in NVivo conducted in the last 6-8 months of 2007. The analyses have focused on: a) the cross-national US-UK comparison, particularly in light of the extensive history of public deliberation efforts in the UK; b) the health and energy cross-application comparison; c) a cross-health group comparison focused on group composition effects as a means of addressing the importance of participant characteristics in driving discussion and debate (younger, more homogeneous vs. more representative sample); and d) methodologies for effective public deliberation in the US. Our analyses have found subtle cross-national differences in risk perceptions and technological determinism but profound differences by public participants in both nations regarding the acceptability of different applications, with energy applications universally seen as urgent and necessary regardless of social, health, or environmental risks and health and enhancement applications regarded with greater ambivalence. Our deliberation research also provides evidence that factors such as recruitment methods and group sociodemographic composition, past experience with deliberative forums, facilitator effects, issue framing, and visual representations of technologies may affect elicited views. This has implications for public participation mechanisms and science policy in the US and abroad. We expect data analysis, report writing, and paper preparation to continue through 2008 with a number of articles in risk, STS, and nano journals.

Co-Funding [NEW PROJECT]: Harthorn and Bryant developed and submitted a proposal to NSF to extend this study that has been recommended for funding. We proposed to use the same protocol and approach for a set of 6 deliberative workshops in California in 2009, focused again on health and energy applications, and varying group composition by gender (a 2x3 design with mixed, all women, and all men groups). This will allow us to leverage the year-long development of the deliberation workshop protocol, provide more comparative data with the original groups to track change over time, and enable a concerted focus on gender as a between group difference and ethnicity as a within group difference in technological risk perception. Discussion is underway for possible additional UK comparative workshops in conjunction with this new study.

IRG-3: Risk Perception. Emergent Public Perceptions of Benefits and Risks (national survey) (Harthorn, Satterfield, Pidgeon, Kandlikar, Beaudrie, Conti)

We have completed development of a new protocol for a national survey of public perceptions of nanotech benefits and risks in the US that is currently (July 2008) in the field. It is a phone survey with a representative sample; with possible supplemental web-based survey with a targeted sample as well, particularly to pilot more experimental aspects of the survey such as a set of questions designed to assess the effects on emerging perception of exposure to visual materials on nanotechnologies, and a decision pathway survey component. Because there has been a series of public surveys of public opinion on nano to date, we have worked hard to ensure that our research will contribute something new. We will do this in part by drawing extensively on validated question sets from other well documented technological risk perception studies, so that we will have good comparative data. We also are using a number of techniques to ask particularly how perceptions emerge in the course of survey exposure to limited knowledge, since 70-90% of the US public continue to claim little or no awareness of nanotechnology. Related question sets we draw from include general views on science and technology, views on other (past and present) technologies, political ideologies or “cultural values,” issues of equity and access to resources, trust in government and industry, and other issues. We have drawn extensively on the qualitative data from the deliberation research to develop the protocol; we plan to focus on some of the same examples and to follow that research in looking primarily at nanotech health/enhancement and energy/environment applications.

As a part of this work, we have compiled a database on all extant nano surveys, have procured protocols for key national surveys to date, and have done extensive bibliographic research on risk perception and values research on issues related to trust, uncertainty, ambivalence, affect, emergent perceptions, science and technology, and a wider array of issues. We expect the new protocol to provide a solid means for studying how perceptions emerge progressively in response to particular frames of benefits, contexts, technical information, and risks, and how that might lead us to predict particular responses for nanotechnology/ies as a (set of) risk object(s).

Co-funding: At the Research Summit in March 2008, we decided that Pidgeon will seek additional funding in the UK to conduct a comparative UK survey using the protocol we have developed for US application. Future survey research will require additional fund seeking, as the costs have become prohibitive for the methodologically most rigorous approaches using phone survey methods.

IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere Group, Bruce Bimber, Co-PI, Group Leader. John Mohr, Phil McCarty, David Weaver, Erica Lively, Robert Ackland (Australian National University), Mathieu O’Neil (ANU)

The Nano in the Public Sphere team in IRG-3 aims at understanding the processes by which nanotechnologies come to be recognized as an object of politics and societal relevance, and by which the democratic system responds to novel developments and policy problems. Specifically, we aim to collect data about how the media, NGO’s, and government institutions frame ideas about nano, and to use these data to explore and develop new models of media framing, agenda-building, and public sphere dynamics.  Aside from the value deriving from intrinsic interest in nanotechnologies, we suspect that the emergence of nano into the public sphere at present and in the immediate future will provide unusual opportunities for observation of the dynamics of public issues at the pre-contestation stage of politics.

Members of this team use several approaches to collecting and analyzing evidence about nano in the public sphere.  These involve: a) identifying public communication about nano by news media, government agencies, and NGOs over time; coding the content of this communication by hand and via automated text-reading algorithms; conducting statistical tests and cluster analyses to identify narrative approaches, frames, and extent of attention to nano.

IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere. Study 1: Nano and the Media Agenda (Bimber, Weaver)

In this work we examine attention to societal implications of nano in global English language news media.  Our research questions combine descriptive and methodological concerns.  First, we ask: what developments or events drive news coverage of societal implications of nanotechnologies? Second, we ask: how does the answer to this question vary depending on the index used to gauge level of attention to nano by journalists.  Our expectations from theory are that actions associated with public officials would dominate news coverage, especially in the case of conflict among officials, while actions and events without involvement of public officials would be relatively less significant in news covarge.  Our method was to develop Boolean search constructs including about two dozen societal implications terms and several nano-related terms, and then to employ the customary academic source for news data, the Lexis-Nexis news database, with a novel and academically untested source, Google News.  Using these we collected about three thousand news stories from 2006 to the present.  Our results show no net increase in attention to nano issues in the two year period beginning in 2006, and distinctly episodic coverage associated with actions involving government agencies (FDA, EPA, City of Berkeley), and release of expert reports.  Comparison of the two databases reveals substantial differences in results that are accounted for chiefly by news wire services and syndicated news stories, which comprise a significant fraction of news coverage of nano so far.   We have reported these results in an article manuscript now in revise & resubmit status at a journal.  

We also conducted a preliminary analysis of issue framing in these data, testing for the presence of clustering among via our search terms, which would suggest the development of specific frames and narrative approaches to news about nano issues, such as a focus on environmental issues, health risks, threats from self-replication or technologies associated with surveillance, and the intersection of these with discussion of public policy, regulation and the like.  Cluster analysis techniques on hand-coded news stories showed no significant clustering of terms or discernable focus in news coverage.

IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere. Study 2: Nano and NGO’s Online. (Bimber, Ackland, O’Neill)

In this study we partnered with Australian National University (ANU)’s Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON), in order to develop a map of web links among environmental organizations with a potential interest in nanotechnologies.  Most of this work was conducted in 2005 and 2006, using webcrawling and network-analysis tools to identify online networks engaged in discussions or political action regarding nanotechnology, and to identify the structure, location, and interlinkages among non-profit, ngo groups engaged with nanotechnology issues. This work has been helpful in producing a schematic understanding of activist networks, and produced several papers and presentations, as well as an article manuscript, which we reported in the previous CNS annual report. In 2007, this work effort was largely in hiatus.  In early 2008, Ackland met with other members of IRG-3’s public sphere group, and we are currently exploring possibilities for applying the web crawling techniques to the analysis of framing of nano.

IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere.  Study 3: Variation in the Framing of Nano. (Bimber, Mohr, McCarty, Weaver, Lively)

Following the preliminary analysis of framing in Study 1 above, we recruited Mohr and McCarty to join CNS and bring their expertise in frame analysis to our efforts in IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere group, with a view toward expanding the framing analysis to the work of other projects at CNS.  Our research questions include the following: What major narrative frames now exist for describing societal implications of nanotechnologies?  Are these frames characteristic of particular actors or institutions – e.g. regulatory agencies, R&D agencies, NGO’s and public interest organizations, Congress, the presidency?  What are the origins of frames reaching the public via the media?  At present, we have identified four large frames, which we call 1) the corporate responsibility frame, 2) the progress frame, 3) the conflict frame, and 4) the authority frame. For example, statements adopting the corporate responsibility frame involve variations on the following message: Corporations are putting the public at risk and the government is not acting.  The progress frame involves the message that science is unfolding in a natural way, promising many good things, but potential harmful side-effects of progress should be anticipated by experts and minimized.  

To identify the presence of these frames in various messages, our method involves collecting primary documents from the institutions and organizations of interest, and then subjecting these to two approaches to analysis. We have begun with every US government report dealing chiefly with societal implications of nanotechnology since 2000, subdivided into regulatory agencies and others (prominently the NNI), along with news coverage in the ten-largest circulation newspapers during the same period.  Our first approach to analysis employs a traditional technique of reading and hand-coding for the presence or absence of the set the frames in a sample of the documents.  In the second, we employ automated full-text searching of our entire population of documents, along with multi-dimensional scaling analysis to identify frames via clustering of terms.

A significant methodological challenge we have set for ourselves is to connect our traditional, hand-coding of documents with the automated analysis, and to report a reliability score comparing the automated analysis with two human coders.   This effort is in progress at the time of this report, and will hopefully produce reportable findings on methodological grounds.  If we are successful at this milestone by the end of summer 2008, we will then apply our techniques to show how framing of nano in news coverage has changed over time and been influenced by various institutional and organizational actors.   IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere. 

Study 4: Framing Theory. (Bimber, Mohr, McCarty, Weaver, Lively)

Studying nanotechnology in the public sphere provides an unusual opportunity to observe the political system responding to a novel or apparently novel issue.  Most important from our perspective is the hypothesis that no established frames and categories yet dominate how the media report on nano (an assertion we explore empirically in study 3).  Politically, nano is in a stage of pre-contestation and proto-framing. We expect that this condition will end eventually, as discourse about nano in the public sphere coalesces around particular frames and issues that become customary in reporting and therefore in public opinion.  In this study, we hope to exploit the current political stage of nano to develop the theory of framing further.  We note that at least three major theoretical traditions about framing exist: these are issue framing, valence or equivalency framing, and thematic vs. episodic framing. All of these involve specific predictions that have been verified empirically to varying degrees. However little work has been done to integrate the predictions of these theories or to synthesize across them.  We plan to attempt that development theoretically, and to test and validate our theory using the empirical techniques we are developing in study 3.  

IRG-3: Nano in the Public Sphere: Tentative Study 5: Comparing Nano and Non-Nano (Bimber, Weaver, new Graduate Fellow)

An underlying theme in most of the research of this group is the question of whether nano is in fact novel as an object of politics, and if so what attributes establish its novelty with respect to democratic processes.  We are exploring approaches to a comparative study of framing of issues that would involve collecting and analyzing data about media coverage of issues such as GMO’s and biotechnology, and selected non-scientific issues.  Theoretically we observe that it is possible that insofar as media coverage and public opinion is concerned that: 1) at least some nanotechnologies have special attributes when compared to other scientific or technological issues (e.g. technical novelty leads to political novelty); 2) nanotechnologies are entirely comparable to other scientific and technological issues (e.g. science politics is different from non-science, but nano is not novel politically); or 3) nano, other scientific and technological issues, and “non-science” issues such as immigration, health, economy, or war all exhibit variation on some underlying dimensions such as uncertainty, threat, and reliance on authority, and that these account for the major dynamics of media coverage.  We are weighing alternatives to a study that would explore these possibilities.