Continued Development of Methods for Characterizing and Ranking Health, Safety and Environmental Risks

风险排序已成为公民向环境决策者提供建议的一种流行方式。 如果这种建议要反映公民的知情判断，就必须找到方法，使参与者既充分了解基本科学，又提供程序性援助，帮助他们系统地解决问题的复杂性。 在这项资助下，一个跨学科小组正在开发和演示这种方法。风险评级需要风险分析和基于价值的判断。 在卡内基梅隆大学的方法中，专家们创建“风险摘要表”，用清晰简单的语言和多属性术语描述每一种危险。 然后，代表性的外行群体，类似于公民陪审团，使用两种趋同的方法对风险进行排名。 第一种是“整体”排序程序-在审查风险摘要表之后，指导参与者通过一个结构化程序对相对风险作出总体判断。 第二种方法是简化的“多属性效用”（MAU）排名程序，参与者为摘要表中描述的每个风险属性分配相对权重，从而可以推断出隐含的排名。 然后，各小组使用其最初的整体排名和MAU程序的结果，以审议和构建最终排名。 该程序使用组和个人方法的组合。 前者试图利用群体互动可能带来的多视角和相互澄清。 后者旨在确保个人继续表达（和反映）其个人观点。 虽然基本方法是建立在行为社会科学的理论和实证结果之上的，但要使其在现实环境中发挥作用，需要大量的实验。 为此，CMU小组在虚构的森特维尔中学创建了一个精心设计的实验测试平台，涉及22个健康和安全风险。目前的拨款用于支持使用学校测试平台的方法的改进和评估。 环境署还支持将这一方法的范围扩大到人类健康和安全风险以外，将生态和其他环境风险包括在内，最终目标是制定各种方法，将健康、安全和环境风险联合收割机纳入一个单一的排序过程。

Risk ranking has become a popular way for citizens to provide advice to environmental decision makers. If such advice is to reflect citizens' informed judgment, methods must be found to provide participants with both an adequate understanding of the underlying science, and with procedural assistance that helps them to address systematically the complexities of the problem. Under this grant, an interdisciplinary team is developing and demonstrating such methods.Risk ranking requires both risk analysis and value-based judgments. In the Carnegie Mellon method, experts create "risk summary sheets," which describe each hazard in clear simple language, and in multi-attribute terms. Then, representative groups of lay people, akin to citizen juries, rank the risks using two converging methods. The first is a "holistic" ranking procedure -- after examining the risk summary sheets, participants are guided through a structured procedure for making overall judgments of relative risk. The second method is a simplified "multi-attribute utility" (MAU) ranking procedure, in which participants assign relative weights to each of the risk attributes described in the summary sheets, allowing implicit ranks to be inferred. Groups then use their initial holistic ranking, and the results of the MAU procedure, in order deliberate and construct a final ranking. The procedure uses a combination of group and individual methods. The former attempt to exploit the multiple perspectives and mutual clarification possible with group interaction. The latter are designed to ensure that individuals continue to express (and reflect on) their personal views. Although the basic approach has been built upon theoretical and empirical results from behavioral social science, making it work in a realistic setting has required a substantial amount of experimentation. To that end, the CMU group has created an elaborate experimental testbed involving 22 health and safety risks in the fictional Centerville Middle School.The current grant is supporting refinement and evaluation of the method using the school test bed. It is also supporting the extension of the method beyond risks to human health and safety to include ecological and other environmental risks with the ultimate goal of developing ways to combine health, safety and environmental risks in a single ranking process.