Over the last two decades, the risk perception and risk communication literature has grown extensively. Because of the abundant number of publications in the field, there is a need for systematic reviews. The current paper provides the results of a systematic review on risk communication regarding potential health effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF EMFs) of mobile communication technologies. The following databases were searched in March 2017: EBSCO (PsycInfo, Academic search premier), Medline, SCOPUS, emf-portal.org. Of 1139 unique hits, 26 articles (including 27 studies) remained after full-text eligibility screening. The majority of studies were experiments. Evaluated against the Cochrane Risk of Bias criteria (Higgins & Green 2011), experimental studies performed well against some criteria (e.g. completeness of outcome data) and mixed against others (e.g. selective reporting, random sequence generation).
Studies were assigned to 9 different categories of content. Categories were comprehensibility of information (4 studies), information on existence of the risk (2), information about uncertainty (3), information focussed on different health effects (3), information about the source of the information (2), information about individual risk and exposure aspects (5), information about precautionary measures (14), effects of television reports and audio-visual advertisements (4), m iscellaneous (2).
For each topic, findings were summarised and, if possible, a recommendation for risk communication practice was derived. Key findings that will be presented include: For information about precautionary measures, the evidence was combined in a meta-analysis. Mean effects showed a significant increase of risk perception regarding mobile phones and mobile phone base stations due to information about precaution (Hedges´ g = .16, 95% confidence interval (.05; .26) for mobile phone risk perception, g = .17 (.10; .24) for base station risk perception). Throughout the topics, many studies did not only analyse main effects but also interactions with recipient characteristics. Interaction analyses suggest that especially prior risk perception shapes the individual evaluation of RF EMF information and has an influence on perceived credibility, interpretation of verbal descriptors of uncertainty, perceived persuasiveness of arguments and the communication´s effect on risk perception. Gaps in the literature and potential avenues for future research are discussed.