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

风险排名已成为公民为环境决策者提供建议的流行方式。如果这样的建议是为了反映公民的知情判断，就必须找到方法，为参与者提供对基本科学的充分理解，并提供程序援助，帮助他们系统地解决问题的复杂性。根据这笔赠款，一个跨学科团队正在开发和演示这种方法。风险排名既需要风险分析，也需要基于价值的判断。在卡内基梅隆大学的方法中，专家们创建了“风险汇总表”，用清晰、简单的语言和多属性术语描述每种危险。然后，由非专业人士组成的具有代表性的团体，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”排名程序--在检查完风险汇总表后，参与者被引导通过一个结构化的程序，对相对风险做出总体判断。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，从而可以推断隐含的排名。然后，小组使用他们的初始整体排名和MAU程序的结果，以便深思熟虑并构建最终排名。该程序结合使用了群体和个人方法。前者试图利用群体互动可能带来的多重视角和相互澄清。后者旨在确保个人继续表达(和反思)其个人观点。尽管基本方法建立在行为社会科学的理论和经验结果之上，但要使其在现实环境中发挥作用，还需要大量的实验。为此，CMU小组在虚构的Centerville中学创建了一个涉及22个健康和安全风险的精心设计的实验试验台。目前的拨款支持使用学校试验台改进和评估这一方法。它还支持将该方法从对人类健康和安全的风险扩展到包括生态和其他环境风险，最终目标是制定方法，将健康、安全和环境风险结合在一个单一的排名过程中。

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.