Aaron Doyle examines Risk, Fear, Blaming, Punitiveness and the Public

SSHRC Grant 2006 – Research Profile
Aaron Doyle, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Project Title: “Risk, Fear, Blaming, Punitiveness and the Public”
Aaron Doyle will be working with sociology PhD student Kevin Walby to interview 120 ordinary people in Ottawa and rural Saskatchewan to investigate reactions by the public to risks from earthquakes to car accidents, to violent crime, to terrorism.

While people are often surveyed about these questions, Doyle and Walby wanted to balance the surveys with some more probing, individualized interviews that investigated what people think and feel in more depth.

Doyle and Walby will explore which risks Canadians decide are important to them, how they decide this, and what they do about it. The team will also examine how fear and other reactions to these risks affect their subjects’ daily lives, as well as what factors influence Canadians’ understandings of various risks. For example, what role is played by the media, which is often accused of fear-mongering? How do public reactions change as people’s surroundings and “sense of place” shift? What are the ties between risks, fear, how we assign blame, and calls for harsh punishment of criminals and others we hold responsible?

The project builds on previous work on risk, on blaming and punitiveness, on the mass media, and on public fears of crime and other dangers.

Doyle developed an interest in the subject for a number of reasons.

“I previously wrote books about how both the media and the insurance industry deal with risks like crime, and about how some particular risks became morally and emotionally loaded while others are treated more dispassionately. I became very interested in how the public made sense of all this,” said Doyle. “Although there had been a lot of surveys done on these questions, I wanted to probe more deeply with a smaller number of people regarding some of the enigmas here. Why, for example, do many people keep supporting the call for harsher punishment by the criminal justice system when much research shows that this does more harm than good? Why do some rural people seem very concerned about some questions like urban street crime and terrorism that seem fairly removed from their everyday lives? These are questions that many people are theorizing about and I felt we needed to go out and talk to everyday people a little more about them.”