ANALYTICAL ISSUES OF RISK COMMUNICATION. RATIONALE FOR APPROACHES TO DEVELOPING RESEARCH DATABASES ON RADIATION SAFETY AND SOCIAL RISKS

Abstract

One of the important stages of risk communication is the analysis of publications in traditional media and the Internet, which largely shape people’s attitudes to various issues. At the same time, the availability of large amounts of information relating to any subject area complicates the possibility of manual analysis and adequate description of all of the information. On the other hand, the availability of information causes the urgency of developing methods to improve the effectiveness of its analysis. One way to automate the analysis of large amounts of information is the development of databases or automated information systems containing information materials on the subject matter under study and suggesting the possibility of automated processing. The objective of this work is to analyze the experience of developing such systems and databases by the research teams of the St. Petersburg Institute of Radiation Hygiene and St. Petersburg State University and to identify key features of the use of bases Data for social research. The results of the analysis showed that the methodological approaches used were very close. The analysis is performed according to the method of autoethnographical research. The strategy application of the comparative analysis allows identifying common features characterizing the situation of development and implementation of databases to practice of the risk communication studies. The article discusses the features associated with them, the limitations of the primary data, such as text, discursive nature of most of the materials, information noise, high dependence on context, variability, different structure, format and appearance of materials. The important parameters for solving problems of the qualitative and quantitative analysis are given in the article. An important condition of creating effective, from the point of view of socio-communication studies information system is to implement the processing capabilities of the collected social data available to researchers programs. The requirement for automation of certain functions depends on a high degree of uniqueness of the materials, which is overcome only by the manual pre- and post-processing, which must be considered when designing research programs.