| This dissertation offered a 2-stage, scenario-based integrated risk assessment and risk communication methodology for new, untested technologies, and applied it to xenotransplantation as a case study to test and demonstrate this general approach to a general problem, i.e., understanding complex, uncertain technologies and communicate them to nonexperts. For this purpose, scenarios and influence diagrams were integrated so as to take advantage of two complementary modes of thinking, i.e., narrative approach of scenarios to knowledge chunking and graph-based approach of influence diagrams to knowledge representation. First, a formal risk model of xenotransplantation was built using influence diagrams. Second, a set of three model-based scenarios were built by sampling a value from each node and expressing them altogether in a verbal-story-like form using the same wording as the model variables. The influence diagram and the set of scenarios conveyed exactly the same information, only in different formats. A third alternative way of risk communication was created by using them together. An experiment was conducted in order to empirically compare these three alternative forms of risk communication to a lay audience, with the perspective that this would be a demonstration of our general approach in this specific context. The empirical results from the experiment indicated that different modes of communication perform better for different tasks. |
