Child leukaemia around Sellafield: what Seascale said about the Black Report

The paper investigates reaction to the Black Report by the inhabitants of Seascale, the community whose situation - in terms of leukaemia incidence and proximity to Sellafield - was the focus of interest of that Report. The paper draws on an original interview-based social survey among the inhabitants of Seascale. As well as routine examination of response frequencies, a new methodological tool for reconstructing aggregate patterns of a large number of multiple character responses (from the Galois connections between response categories) is used as primary basis for interpretative analysis. It is found that the Black Report was received in Seascale with a mixture of confusion, satisfaction, deferred judgement and sharp criticism, and implications of this finding for the risk perception research field, as well as for policy makers, are brought out. (author)