Food
	Land
	and Culture

	Presentation Summary
	Lac Courte Oreilles Casino and Convention Center Oct 3-4, 2002
	Risk Communications
	Bob Griffin Professor of Journalism Marquette University
	Efforts to communicate with members of the public about potential risks from genetically modified foods and other perceived hazards often rely on attempts to convey to non-experts rather technical information, especially information couched in terms of probabilities, statistics, and cost-benefit comparisons. Experts who communicate with the public about risks often approach the task as one of effectively conveying information from themselves to the less knowledgeable, seemingly assuming that the task is to inject understanding among stakeholders and the public at large. However, this top-down, –sender-oriented” approach runs counter to suggestions by many risk perception researchers that communicators and educators should consider –receiver-oriented,” bottom-up approaches which place an emphasis on understanding the non-expert public as consumers of information, and ones who can become engaged intellectually with the risk issue at hand. Instead of just asking how messages may influence people, this receiver-oriented approach calls for a focus on understanding individual variation in the evaluative behaviors of the information user. This presentation will examine the various ways that non-expert members of the public evaluate perceived risks, such as those from genetically modified foods, and how those evaluations might affect their attitudes, behaviors, and the use they make of information they may encounter about genetically modified foods.
	From The University of Wisconsin-Madison/Extension
	Sponsored by a grant from USDA/CSREES/IFAFS
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