Abstract
The present study described the results of the surveys of public perceptions of the social issues and risks related to radiation in 2006-2007. One survey involved personal visit interviews carried out, and resulted in 610 valid responses from men and 747 from women, aged 20 years and older. We also asked subjects for private information such as their sex, age, occupation and so on. We then compiled the results for each attribute. The majority identified global warming as highly risky among social issues related to technology, and smoking among health–damaging issues. And nuclear power-related items such as nuclear weapons, nuclear wastes and nuclear facilities were regarded as the terrible items. However, majority did not bring up any image from the terms of radiation and health effects of radiation. In the second survey, we asked Japanese adults to rank 30 items related to various types of technologies and human activities according to their subjective judgments on the order of perceived magnitude of risk using Web-based questionnaires. As a result, the risk perceptions of the Japanese, irrespective of gender, age and occupation, have been uniform during the last 25 years, and the majority regarded hand guns, nuclear power and smoking as the high-risk items. The third questionnaire survey was conducted on radiation risk, targeted at nurses (170 females). Most of them tended to assess exposed parts, doses and damage potentially suffered based on their professional experiences and knowledge in order to distinguish acceptable risks rationally from unacceptable ones. Then, nurses with children perceived food exposure as more risky and infertility as less concerned compared with those without. The risk communication in consideration of these risk perception is the problem we should solve immediately.
