Doctoral Dissertation Research in Decision, Risk, & Management Sciences: Procedural Justice and Media Coverage of Public Engagement about Local Health and Environmental Risks

本论文项目旨在将程序正义的研究整合到我们如何理解媒体报道对当地公共生活的影响中，特别是与健康和环境风险相关的当地参与。近几十年来，程序正义作为一种在一系列环境中检验“公平”的基本人类价值的理论基础手段而出现。程序正义研究的核心假设是，如果个人认为决策背后的过程是公平的，他们更有可能接受该决策，对决策者感到满意，并代表做出决策的群体采取未来的行动。过去的媒体研究并没有试图测试不同类型和水平的媒体使用是否与公平观念有关，尽管大量研究表明，公平是个人对公民领袖态度的重要因素。研究的主要重点将是收集和分析来自纽约州北部的调查数据，旨在获得个人对以下方面的评估：地方当局的程序和分配公平性、地方风险感知、外部效率、信任、媒体使用模式和标准公民结果变量（如地方政治参与水平和对政府的满意度）。该调查将通过对北部记者的采访、对当地新闻内容的定性考虑以及几项社会心理学实验来补充，这些实验涉及让学生样本接触有关当地环境健康风险的模拟媒体内容。该项目旨在扩大正在进行的研究的适用性，利用程序正义来了解关于风险的传统公开会议如何影响参与者和非参与者对政府专家和官员的看法。了解媒体的使用和关注是否与媒体用户对当局公平的看法有关，应该有助于形成用于公众参与的传播信息和策略。

This dissertation project seeks to integrate research on procedural justice into how we understand the impact of media coverage on local public life, particularly local engagement related to health and environmental risks. Procedural justice has emerged in recent decades as a theoretically-grounded means of examining the fundamental human value of "fairness" in a range of settings. The core hypothesis of procedural justice research is that if an individual perceives that the process underlying a decision is fair, they are more likely to accept that decision, feel satisfied with the decision-maker, and undertake future action on behalf of the group within which the decision was made.Past media research has not sought to test whether various types and levels of media use are associated with fairness perceptions, despite substantial research demonstrating that fairness is an important contributor to individual attitudes towards civic leaders. The main focus on the research will be the collection and analysis of survey data from Upstate New York aimed at obtaining individuals' assessments of: local authorities' procedural and distributive fairness, local risk perceptions, external efficacy, trust, media-use patterns, and standard civic outcomes variables (e.g. level of local political participation and satisfaction with government). The survey will be complemented by interviews with Upstate journalists, qualitative consideration of local news content, and several social-psychological experiments involving the exposure of student samples to simulated media content about local environmental health risks. The project is meant to broaden the applicability of ongoing research using procedural justice to understand how traditional public meetings about risk affect participants' and non-participants' perceptions of government experts and officials. Understanding whether media use and attention is associated with media users' perceptions of authorities fairness should support the shaping of communication messages and strategies used for public engagement.