Surveying the public’s understanding of 5G tech, exposure to RF-EMF and potential health risks

The global rollout of 5G mobile technology has sparked concerns about potential health impacts from radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF). These worries, in part fuelled by misinformation, potentially reflect varying perceptions among the public of how 5G tech works, how its use affects our exposure to RF-EMF, and how such exposure might affect health.

Despite growing interest, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how much these concerns are based on misunderstandings, and how widespread these misconceptions are across different countries and demographics.

A tablet in the hands of a participant displaying the respondent interface of the GOLIAT-SEAWave panel survey.

Informed by in-depth interviews conducted by researchers at the University of Vienna, GOLIAT work package 6 (WP6) researchers set about designing a detailed survey with the aim of finding out how the general public perceive 5G and how prevalent misconceptions relating to 5G are in different countries, and in specific population subgroups. The lead researcher on the survey, epidemiologist James Grellier (University of Exeter) explained: “This kind of research is a great way of improving risk communication. There’s no point repeating the same messaging to people if it doesn’t improve their understanding, or if it’s something that they already know. Finding out about people’s misconceptions about 5G will help tailor messaging to specific population and better communicate exposure- and health risk-related information more generally.”

The WP6 team—led by James Grellier at the University of Exeter—discovered that researchers working on the SEAWave project (also part of the CLUE-H project cluster) were planning survey work relating to RF-EMF exposure perception. This group—led by environmental psychologist Christoph Böhmert at the International University in Germany—were designing a panel survey to understand more about how the public perceive their exposure to RF-EMF from a variety of sources and under different conditions. The similarity of our approaches allowed us to collaborate on a joint survey, which meant we could greatly expand the reach of our survey to ten European countries and Japan, thereby adding considerable value to both projects.

University of Exeter researchers analyse the GOLIAT-SEAWave panel survey data using R statistical software.

Working across several disciplines, institutions and countries, the GOLIAT-SEAWave team carefully designed an online survey that collected data from adult panel respondents on their sociodemographic characteristics, their health and well-being, the use and views of 5G, their  perception of RF-EMF exposure, and their perception of health risks relating to 5G. Great care was taken to design the survey in such a way that respondents were not inadvertently primed to link exposure and health, for example, so as not to bias responses. The survey methodology was published on the OSF repository in the spirit of Open Science.

Quota sampling was used so that the results could be considered representative of the populations of all the countries involved in terms of age and gender, as well as regions. This means that the numbers of individuals in each age group, gender and region in each country were gathered and then scaled to the target sample of 1000 respondents per country. Once quotas had been calculated, the online survey went live and links were sent by the survey company to their existing panel respondents. Once respondents had accepted the invitation to participate—by clicking on a link to the online survey. Each quota was closed when sufficient numbers of surveys had been properly completed by the relevant age, gender and region groups.

Map of western Europe and Asia showing the countries in which the GOLIAT-SEAWave panel survey was done.

Depending on the country, the researchers faced various challenges to recruit certain combinations of age and gender. For example, in several countries it was very difficult to find sufficient women over the age 65 to complete the survey, largely because internet penetration for that age group is relatively low. In other countries, recruiting young men (16-25) was particularly difficult, seemingly because they are not interested in participating in panel surveys. In these cases, once the response rate slowed significantly, the survey was closed and the data for any undersampled population groups were assigned weights to make them representative in subsequent analyses.

Data collection for all eleven countries was completed in March 2024. The final data set comprises 11,293 valid responses. A total of 38,122 respondents began the survey, but 26,829 were screened out because quotas were full, because responses failed tests incorporated into the survey to identify those not paying attention or exhibiting poor understanding of the questions, or because they responded unrealistically quickly (<10mins) or too slowly (>60mins).

The data are currently being analysed by teams of researchers across Europe, to meet the aims of tasks within both SEAWave and GOLIAT projects. Together, the researchers anticipate publishing several papers based on these analyses over the next two years. These will investigate a variety of themes including public (mis)understanding of 5G technology, public concern about potential health impacts of 5G, the predictors of acceptance of 5G in the general population, and a number of papers on exposure perception.