Using transparency to increase awareness of chemical hazards
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•456 views
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Viewers also liked
Similar to Using transparency to increase awareness of chemical hazards
Similar to Using transparency to increase awareness of chemical hazards (20)
More from DIv CHAS
More from DIv CHAS (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Using transparency to increase awareness of chemical hazards
- 1. Miriam Weil, MPH, ScD Work Environment Policy UMASS Lowell *Funding for this project was provided by NIOSH through the Harvard ERC and by the National Science Foundation UMASS Lowell 12/12/2011
- 2. Research Question How can the internet help provide timely and useful health and safety information to people working with chemicals around academic laboratories? Hypothesis: For web-based chemical hazard information to be useful to researchers and workers at universities, it must be embedded so that action can be taken to reduce or prevent exposures. UMASS Lowell 12/12/2011
- 3. What is Embeddedness? Three elements determine whether a message is “embedded” in the users‟ decision-making process: Relevance: pertinent to user decisions. Compatibility: with the user‟s language and „socioeconomic‟ or workplace culture. Accessibility : easily found and consistent with the conventional patterns for finding information. Source: Fung Graham and Weil, 2007 3
- 4. Participants Subjects: Students (17) Laboratory Staff (18) Sites: UMASS Lowell Harvard University UMASS Lowell 12/12/2011
- 5. Method: Exercise Format Four parts to the experiment: 1. Pre-test- Background questions 2. Ethylene Glycol hypothetical question 3. Acetonitrile hypothetical question 4. Exit interview For 2 and 3 : Rate the relevance, compatibility, accessibility of each website towards pursuing the problem using a 5 point rating scale: where 1 is worst and 5 is best 5
- 6. Exercise Format Rate the relevance, compatibility, accessibility of each website towards pursuing the problem using the following rating scale: 1 Disagree strongly 2 Disagree 3 Neither agree nor disagree 4 Agree 5 Agree strongly UMASS Lowell 12/12/2011
- 7. Websites in the Study ATSDR Google Tox Town ICSC NJ RTK EWG CHE U.S. Govt. - Publically U.S. Govt. Intl. State of NGO: Env. NGO : Centers for Held National Agencies: New Working Collab. for Disease Company Library UNEP, ILO Jersey Group - Health and Control of Dept of Research, Env. – Medicine Heath and Advocacy Research, Senior Advocacy Services UMASS Lowell 12/12/2011
- 8. Average Website Ratings Results: Average Website Ratings Relevance Compatibility Accessibility 8
- 9. Relationships between ratings and stated Relationships between ratings and stated intention to revisit intentions to revisit Controlling for work status and web searching history. * indicates Measured occurrence: significant An increase of at 0.05 level 1=increase in revisit. 9
- 10. The Google Effect Google is the default. May not find best information. Lab culture requires speed. Miss other valuable sites 10
- 11. Findings/Conclusions Criteria rankings influenced favorable choices. ATSDR, NJ and ICSC rated highly. The internet can provide helpful and useful information. Chemical safety sites require useful content and a high Google ranking 11
Editor's Notes
- When information is “embedded”, It is in the right place, the right format at the right time.it is retained and absorbed. Integrated into decision-makingCan result in a change in behavior. According to Fung et al, these three elements determine embeddedness. Relevance, Compatibility, AccessibilityOn the lower right is an example of a sign that changes behavior. A NYC health department restaurant health rating. Seeing this would influence your choice to go to this restaurant. As opposed to this rating.
- These look like little kids. Harvard University Clerical and Technical Workers Union helped.
- Background questions such as Years of Education. Major subject studied. Worker or student. If worker, what kind of lab. Whether they had searched for health and safety on the web before.For the 2nd and 3rd parts, the format of the exercise was to use websites to find the answers to the hypothetical questions and to rate the websites according to questions pertaining to the three embeddedness criteria - relevance, compatibility and accessibility1 Disagree strongly Agree stronglyExit questions- did the exercise seem like something that might happen in the lab? Did any of the sites seem better than others? Would you go back to any of them?
- Questions regarding each criterion . Asked to rate the websites according to the criteria.
- Try the search using each website and compare the search experience between the websites. Rate experience by answering the questions related to the embeddedness criteria. Keep track of what information you obtain from each website and what your impressions are of each.
- The answers to the embeddedness questions were numeric. There were multiple questions to generate the ratings. I averaged them together to get the ratings. These are the results. The evaluations of each website varied by criterion but were generally consistent. The first you see is relevance. Each color post represents a website. The four or five websites on the left rate pretty highly. The ones on the right significantly lower.Similar for Compatibility and Accessibility.
- Did ratings affect revisiting probability? Used regression to see if there was an association between the ratings and likelihood of returning to the site. I controlled for student status vs. employee and a reported search history for health and safety information.Relevance – The ATSDR bar is the highest which means the rating of the website was highly related to the stated likelihood of returning to it. In general, a score greater than 1 means that people are likely to go back to the site given a high ranking and less likely to go back given a low ranking. Accessibility – Most accessibility ratings are associated with the stated likely of return except for Google. ATSDR and EWG stand out in this case, and EWG was one of the lower rated sites.Compatibility. This pattern is similar for many of the sites. All the websites ratings were significantly related to the likelihood of return in at least one of the dimensions. With one exception, GOOGLE. This means whether Google was rated high or low, did not effect the likelihood of going back to it. As opposed to ATSDR or EWG, where the rating had significant influence. People go back to Google no matter whether they had success finding the information or not or regardless whether it took a long time to find it or not. For the other websites, a good experience influenced whether they would revisit the site.
- We have become used to Google for quick (but not always valuable) results regardless of relevance, and compatibility. In this investigation a critical factor was that lab culture does not allow time for lengthy searches for information.Other valuable sites may be ignored even if they are useful because they may not come up on a Google search.This exercise at least introduced people to other possibly valuable sources of information.
- Participants in the study benefited from exposure to websites and after exposure were more inclined to rank certain ones more highly and favor them for future internet searches. Chemical safety sites require good content and a high Google ranking to be effective and revisitedLab personnel, both students and employees, default to Google and would not be able to find high-rated sites if they don’t come up high in a Google search. Found that many participants relied on Google alone. Hopefully this exercise woke them up a little.3. I found a good website called MSDS online that has MSDS but also has all sorts of other sources of information, including most of the websites in my study. It has a high Google ranking if you enter the right search term.