Public information on radioactive waste: a study of an emerging issue

Through an analysis of information provided in the printed media on the topic of radioactive waste, the study analyzes the emergence of radioactive waste as a public issue in the press. Over eight hundred articles printed in both specialized and non-specialized sources from 1973 to 1978 have been content-analyzed in order to describe how the problem of radioactive waste is defined and what dimensions of the problems are receiving attention. Between 1973 and 1978, there was a substantial increase in the amount of information on the topic of radioactive waste available to the public through a variety of popular and specialized media sources. This increase coincides with documented public concern with the problem of radioactive waste. Discussions of radioactive waste have focused for all sources more frequently on themes not directly related to the technical problems of radioactive waste storage or isolation. A substantial amount of the information available to a variety of segments of the public is composed of discussions of real or perceived risk related to the existence of waste or to methods of disposing of it. In addition to risk, a substantial proportion of the discussions deal with institutional themes. Over time, the total amount of information on most dimensions of the radioactive waste problem has increased substantially. Institutional themes have gained relative to other issues over the three time periods. National and local press sources infrequently specify the form of waste being discussed thus providing evidence that the quality of technical information available to some members of the public is very low

ATTITUDE MEASURES IN EVALUATION RESEARCH: A RESEARCH NOTE

The paper focuses on the use of attitude measures in evaluation research. It is suggested that attitude measures can assist evaluators in surmounting the problems of assessing program effectiveness both in process and impact evaluations. Attitude change can be conceptualized as the intended output of programs, as intervening between program variables and behavior or as proxy measures of behavioral target variables that are not readily measurable. Attitude measures can play avital role in evaluation research if an adequate methodology is employed. Copyright 1986 by The Policy Studies Organization.