The Belgian Risk Perception Barometer: Risk Perception Measuring Instruments Revisited

After a brief historic introduction, the paper discusses the drawbacks of large scale public opinion polls and the impact of these drawbacks on the usefulness and reliability of their outcome. It then comes to some guidance on how to avoid pitfalls and how this guidance was applied in an example in Belgium on risk and trust, food safety and norm acceptability, further refined to radioactive contaminations in the food chain. This methodological focus a.o. includes the requirement to work with clear hypotheses, to construct summated variables, points of attention as regards wording, the behaviour of interviewer and interviewee.