Concernsmost

Concernsmost is a concept in decision-making and risk assessment describing a method that prioritizes the concerns most frequently raised by stakeholders or the public. It is not a formal standard in major regulatory regimes, but it appears in informal discourse, participatory planning, and some communication practices.

The term combines 'concern' and 'most' to signal attention to top-tier issues. In practice, practitioners collect concerns through surveys, public forums, comment analyses, or social media monitoring, then categorize and count them to identify which issues recur most often.

Implementation typically follows steps: define a set of concerns; gather input from relevant groups; code and tally concerns; rank by frequency or weighted frequency; select policy actions or communications that address the top concerns; and track changes over time. It can be used alone or as part of broader analysis methods, such as multi-criteria decision analysis or qualitative risk assessment.

Advantages include transparency and a focus on what stakeholders most commonly worry about, while limitations include potential neglect of minority concerns, dependence on sampling quality, and a lack of normative guidance about which concerns deserve priority. Critics also note that frequency of concern does not automatically equate to severity or feasibility of mitigation, and that power imbalances can skew which concerns are most audible.

See also: Stakeholder analysis; Participatory planning; Risk communication; Multi-criteria decision analysis.