企画セッション開催報告　調査公害について考える2

抄録

This paper reports a special session on “chosa kogai” held at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis, Japan, and examines ethical challenges and directions for disaster-related research. We define “chosa kogai” as the excessive and uncoordinated accumulation of social surveys that imposes physical and psychological burdens on respondents in disaster-affected communities. Drawing on interviews with researchers who conducted studies after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, the first contribution clarifies how over-surveying, insufficient feedback of results, vicarious trauma among researchers, and an individualized conception of vulnerability generate ethical concerns within performance-driven structures. The second contribution analyzes mortality among long-term care residents affected by the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, showing how evacuation and disruptions of continuity of care influence outcomes, and how combining data collection with on-site support can mitigate survey burden. The third contribution frames “chosa kogai” as a fallacy of composition: even when individual projects pass institutional review, their aggregate impact can exhaust communities and undermine trust in science. The final contribution highlights mismatches between actors who ought to lead necessary surveys in recovery processes and those who actually collect data, as well as fragmented data-sharing across governmental, academic, and private bodies. We argued that research activities should be constrained by setting upper limits on the number of studies and lower limits on the number of investigators, or alternatively should incorporate assessments of how they contribute to recovery process through implementing actors. Therefore, academic societies should support coordination mechanisms such as preregistration and shared registries.