Questions relating to the public perception of risk continue to be the focus of scholarly as well as policy and practitioner attention. Various issues that shape the public perceptions of risk are now well established, having been explored in terms of their psychological, social and cultural dimensions. The relation between media and public risk perception continues to be examined with the rise of social media providing fresh impetus to this discussion. Within the integrative focus provided by the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, consideration of the nature of public risk perceptions is framed by notions of the intensification and attenuation of these perceptions. Thus considerations of public risk perception often attend to its rise and fall over time, the extent to which it relates to expert assessments of risk or document patterns of media coverage often implicitly – and unhelpfully – assuming this as a proxy for the nature of public attentiveness to the risk. Arguably however, this focus obscures a consideration of the nature of this attentiveness – are particular publics perceiving risk; are they concerned, if not what does this attentiveness mean? If yes what is the nature of this concern?
Against this backdrop, the current paper addresses the overarching question of what did ‘public concern’ in response to ash dieback disease, in unsolicited emails and phone calls to a Defra national helpline, actually entail? Our unique, naturally occurring data set comprised 1453 emails and 1677 calls from the general public to Defra and the Forestry Commission during the peak of media attention to the emergence of ash dieback disease in the UK in late 2012. We interrogated the data using Textometrica software and Connected Concept Analysis (CCA); a framework for text analysis which addresses both qualitative and quantitative considerations (Lindgren, 2016). The results illustrate the heterogeneous nature of the publics who chose to get in touch and indicate that concern was rarely expressed in the text of the email communications. We seek to unpack the range of reasons that people provide for contacting the authorities and the individual and social rationales provided. Finally we reflect on the implications of our analysis for the sort of material that is marshalled and re-presented by both scholars and policy actors in order to warrant claims of public concern. Our work will be of interest to scholars working not only with SARF, but also communication and media more broadly.