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Part 1: The Mission

1.5 Barriers and Opportunities for Communication

Learning Objectives

  • To be able to identify and describe potential barriers to science and risk communication.
  • To develop strategies to overcome barriers to science and risk communication.

Once you have defined your mission, you will need to identify potential barriers that could prevent you from accomplishing it. A barrier in science and risk communication is anything that could prevent you from delivering your message or prevent your audience from receiving, understanding, or acting on it. There are many different frameworks used to classify communication barriers. For this textbook, we have identified four types of barriers: 1) barriers associated with the organization in charge of communication, 2) barriers associated with the communicator, 3) barriers associated with the audience, and 4) barriers associated with the situation in which the communication is taking place. 

It is important to identify communication barriers so that you can employ effective techniques to overcome those barriers, or, if no such techniques exist, potentially adjust your mission in order to maximize the efficiency and efficacy of your communication program.

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

The Mission, the Message, and the Medium Copyright © by Chelsea Himsworth, Kaylee Byers, and Jennifer Gardy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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