Looking for citizen-centered communication: dialogues between radiological protection or nuclear safety specialists and media professionals.

What happens when radiological protection or nuclear safety officials get together with media professionals to talk about public communication on ionizing radiation risks? Do they have common views of the challenges and ways to meet these? This practical article reports on dialogue workshops organized by the EAGLE project in four European countries (France, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia). Common findings are classed and presented by themes, including inter alia: crisis versus everyday communication; mediated versus direct communication; sources, actors, roles and responsibilities; language and format; trust and confidence, balance in reporting and development of risk culture; nuclear industry promotion versus citizen-centered risk communication. The article also presents reflections from an expanded international workshop (RICOMET, June 2015). It echoes the participants in calling for a platform for ongoing dialogue between information sources and transmitters, in the interest of building solid relationships, risk culture and public understanding on ionizing radiation.

Lay public mental models of ionizing radiation: representations and risk perception in four European countries.

How do members of the lay public understand ionizing radiation and its effects? How do they define ionizing radiation, and to which other concepts do they connect it? Do they perceive danger and risks? Do they know how to protect themselves? What do they think of various applications of ionizing radiation? Where and how does the public lodge confidence or doubt? What is the demand for information and transparency? We applied the mental models approach to investigate these questions in four European countries (France, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia; 63 respondents), providing a rich picture of how the lay public perceives ionizing radiation. Mental models are messy and overlapping but meaningful and useful schemas, resulting from a person's multidimensional experience and relation to the surrounding natural and social world. Collectively, members of the lay public (independently of their education or background) possess a non-negligible amount of knowledge on the topic of ionizing radiation risk, and hold strong views on related concepts. Mutual understanding between specialists and potentially affected citizens may be a critical pathway to build a shared and effective risk culture supported by accurate, two-way risk communication and inter-actor relationships.