THE CAUSE MODEL OF RISK COMMUNICATION
The Cause model of Risk Communication is a communication approach between the parties involved in the communication process, which entails exchanging meanings and information about nature, advent, magnitude, significance, and the control of prospective risk. In the CAUSE model of communication risk, public relation practitioners struggle with challenges of Confidence, Awareness creation among the public (the target audience for the risk communication message), Understanding of the message, the Public’s Feelings towards the communicated solutions to the risk and their cause of action as they await Enactment of the postulated solutions (Rowan et al. 2010).
Confidence, Awareness, Understanding, Solution, and Enactment are, therefore, the five basic tenants of the Cause model of Risk communication, and each tenant affects the risk communication process distinctly. The model thus intends to increase the public’s confidence despite the risks posed by the subject at hand, and create awareness and understanding of the phenomenon among the public. The model aims at producing more effective solutions and actions towards risk or crisis and helping the general public into enacting the appropriate moves after a crisis has occurred (Rowan et al. 2010).
The Sandman’s work on hazard and outage proposes that, during risk communication, the communicator should focus on communicating the potential hazards likely to be caused by the risk, and ignore the reaction from the general public towards the information (Hooker, Capon & Leask, 2017). Furthermore, the more effective the hazard communication is the less the public’s outrage. The cause model of risk communication, therefore, builds on the Sandman’s approach in the essence that the cause model entails creating public confidence, and create awareness and understanding among the general public to minimize outrageous reaction from the public. Focusing on the hazards of the risk enables the communicator to develop a compelling message capable of preventing outrageous reaction