July 28th, 2015 | RESEARCH
Understanding a community's concerns and informational needs is crucial to conducting and improving environmental health research and literacy initiatives. We hypothesized that analysis of community inquiries over time at a legacy mining site would be an effective method for assessing environmental health literacy efforts and determining whether community concerns were thoroughly addressed. Through a qualitative analysis, we determined community concerns at the time of being listed as a Superfund site. We analyzed how community concerns changed from this starting point over the subsequent years, and whether: 1) communication materials produced by the USEPA and other media were aligned with community concerns; and 2) these changes demonstrated a progression of the community's understanding resulting from community involvement and engaged research efforts. We observed that when the Superfund site was first listed, community members were most concerned with USEPA management, remediation, site-specific issues, health effects, and environmental monitoring efforts related to air/dust and water. Over the next five years, community inquiries shifted significantly to include exposure assessment and reduction methods and issues unrelated to the site, particularly the local public water supply and home water treatment systems. Such documentation of community inquiries over time at contaminated sites is a novel method to assess environmental health literacy efforts and determine whether community concerns were thoroughly addressed.
Document
(no document provided)
Team Members
University of Arizona, ContributorMonica Ramirez-Andreotta, Author, University of Arizona
Nathan Lothrop, Author, University of Arizona
Sarah Wilkinson, Author, University of Arizona
Robert Root-Bernstein, Author, University of Arizona
Janick Artiola, Author, University of Arizona
Walter Klimecki, Author, University of Arizona
Miranda Loh, Author, University of Arizona
Citation
Identifier Type: DOI
Identifier: 10.1007/s13412-015-0297-x
Publication: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences
Funders
Funding Source: NIH
Related URLs
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-015-0297-x
Tags
Audience: Adults | Evaluators | Families | General Public | Scientists
Discipline: Chemistry | Education and learning science | General STEM | Health and medicine | Life science
Resource Type: Peer-reviewed article | Research Products
Environment Type: Citizen Science Programs | Community Outreach Programs | Public Programs