The last years, the attention for safety has grown, especially for external safety. Because of events like 9-11, the fire in Volendam and the fireworks accident in Enschede, the attention for external safety has increased. The government pays more attention to external safety and also the public is more aware of possible accidents. Next to the effort to increase the objective (mathematically calculated) safety, also more and more attention is paid to the subjective safety; the feeling that people have about the safety of a situation. From the government increases the idea that something has to be done with the perception of safety of the public increases. Attention is paid to the integration of perception in policy documents of the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment. Next to this, decision-making is sometimes guided by perception. It is often mentioned that perception should be taken into account while taking decisions about external safety projects. There is however no clear vision of what to do with perception in decision-making. The perception is difficult to measure and there is no clear vision on the place perception should have next to the objective risk calculations. There is research needed on the causes of subjective (un) safety; why do people feel (un) safe, in what way does this perception come about? Can this be used to develop an instrument to take into account perception? It is the objective of this research to explore the possibilities of integrating perception of external safety in the assessment phase of a project. The perception should be integrated in a structural and transparent way, without the consequences of delay of the complete decisionmaking process. The structure of the report is as follows. First the research problem description is given in chapter 2. In this chapter an overview is given of the research problem, the research objective and research questions. Also the research methods are described. Then, attention is paid to the current external safety policy and the attention for perception in this policy in chapter 3. In chapter 4 a theoretical background is given. An overview is given of scientific research done on perception. In chapter 5 a comparison is made with several other policy areas in which perception is used. To what degree can these policy areas be compared to external safety and what can be learned from the use of perception in these policy areas? Based on the information from chapter 2 till 5 an empirical research is performed in chapter 6; a survey and several interviews are performed. Chapter 6 is followed by a chapter about factors other than perception that might influence the problems around external safety. In chapter 8 conclusions and recommendations are made. In chapter 9 a reflection is given on the performed research. (Author/publisher) Nederlands abstract: Naar aanleiding van een groeiende aandacht voor (externe) veiligheid en overheidsaandacht voor de beleving van veiligheid in de maatschappij is dit project tot stand gekomen. Het idee achter het onderzoek is om niet alleen de kwantitatieve aspecten van veiligheid (gebaseerd op risicoberekeningen), maar ook de subjectieve aspecten te betrekken bij de besluitvorming. Hiervoor is gezocht naar een model waarmee beleving in kaart kan worden gebracht. In het project is zowel theoretisch als empirisch onderzoek gedaan naar de beleving van externe veiligheid. Met de gevonden methoden uit de theorie zijn zowel een enquete als interviews en case studies uitgevoerd. Op deze manier zijn theoretische modellen toegepast op de beleving van externe veiligheid. (Author/publisher)
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