SRA-E Lisbon 2017

This presentation addresses government agencies’ risk communication with the public through their web sites. Seven Swedish government agencies have been selected in the following policy areas: (i) chemicals, (ii) civil contingency, (iii) energy, (iv) the environment, (v) food, (vi) housing and building, and (vii) traffic are explored and compared. The analysis is based on corpus linguistic methods. In corpus linguistics, the uses of linguistic features (e.g. words and phrases) are in large bodies of texts, i.e. corpora (the word “corpus” is Latin for “body”). In this study, the corpus analysed consists of the HTML-files of the seven agencies’ web sites. Corpus linguistic tools applied in the analysis are: (i) frequency lists, which show how frequent different linguistic forms are in the corpus; (ii) collocation analysis, which shows which words are the most frequent to co-occur with a target word, e.g. “risk”; and (iii) concordance analysis, which systematically shows the contexts in which a target word is used. This study applies these techniques in order to address the following research questions: To what extent do the agencies communicate about “risk”? Which concepts in the semantic field of risk are in focus (“risk”, “danger”, “safety” or other)? How do the agencies conceptualise risk? For example, is risk conceptualised quantitatively or qualitatively? Is it understood probabilistically? What specific risk issues are in focus on their web sites? How are these issues construed? For example, which values are considered at stake (e.g. health or environment)? With respect to each question the results for the seven agencies are compared, enabling conclusions about general and specific patterns of Swedish government agencies’ risk communication. Thus, the study addresses the question of whether the agencies communicate about risk in a uniform way, or if they differ, for example, depending on the policy area that they regulate. Another contribution of the presentation is to illustrate how a corpus based approach can be applied in the study of risk communication.