Spoil the Rod or Spare the Child (and Adult?): An Empirical Analysis of the Readability of Risk Assessment Information in Superfund Cleanup Records of Decision. M. J. Anders, North Carolina State University
A key risk assessment issue is the understandable communication of risk-related information. An important example of public communication of risk is the federal Superfund program for cleaning contaminated sites. In the Superfund process, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) publishes a Record of Decision (ROD) explaining how it chose its site cleanup method. The information in the ROD’s risk assessment section should be as clear as possible so the community can evaluate the basis for EPA’s decision and how well the cleanup will remedy the risk. I empirically evaluate the readability of RODs by selecting a random sample of about 200 RODs from the 1980s to present. From each ROD, I select text discussing the site’s risk assessment and calculate quantitative indices of readability (eg, Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid reading indices, human interest indices, and others). These readability measures indicate how readable are ROD risk assessment sections, indicating how well the public might understand Superfund risk assessment decisions. Each readability measure is then used as the dependent variable in multiple regression analyses, using the text from each ROD as a separate observation. These analyses identify the causes for variations in RODs’ readability by including independent variables, such as the EPA office responsible for the ROD, the ROD date, the type of site being cleaned up, the length of the ROD risk assessment section, and others. Finally, factor analysis is used to create a factor representing all of the readability measures. The resulting factor scores are used as the dependent variable in a regression analysis to assess the causes for variations in readability. These analyses provide guidance on how to resolve problems in ROD readability.
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