Research methodology

Technical and regulatory content

Radon mechanics, action levels, measurement protocol, device placement, and mitigation methods are anchored to EPA publications and to the standards those publications reference. The approved source list is published at our citation standards page, and the site is scanned before each deployment to confirm no citation points outside it.

State licensing and disclosure content is anchored to the responsible agency or the statute. Where a state regime is structural — Illinois licenses statewide through IEMA-OHS, Wisconsin does not license at all — we state it. Where it is operational, such as a current fee or renewal cycle, we route the reader to the agency rather than restating a figure we cannot re-verify.

Local content

Market and city pages describe housing stock, foundation types, building eras, geology, and transaction rhythm. This is descriptive research about durable characteristics, not statistical claims about radon levels in a place.

That distinction is deliberate and load-bearing. We will say that a neighbourhood is dominated by pre-1940 masonry foundations with partial basements, because that is observable and stable. We will not say that homes in that neighbourhood average a particular radon level, because we have no defensible basis for it and because area averages do not describe individual addresses anyway.

Where EPA radon zone designations are mentioned, they are described as what they are: county-level planning tools for public-health agencies that do not predict any individual home.

What we deliberately do not attempt

We do not aggregate or publish radon test results by area. We do not maintain a database of local measurements. We do not publish contractor counts, availability claims, or response-time promises. We do not publish reviews or ratings.

Each of those would make the site look more authoritative and would require either data we do not have or claims we could not stand behind. The absence is the honest position, not an oversight.

Environment limits that affect this site

The build environment for this platform has no outbound network access beyond package and source repositories. That means citation URLs are recorded in their canonical published forms and are not re-fetched at build time, and it means agency-specific operational details cannot be re-verified here.

We handle that by declaring it rather than papering over it: the citation registry carries a note describing the limitation and the command to verify the links from an unrestricted machine, state pages state what they deliberately do not restate, and newsroom dispatches are standing analysis rather than reported events.

How content is kept current

Every editorial page carries a publication date, a review date, and a revision log. The displayed update date is derived from the log rather than declared, so it cannot advance without a corresponding logged change — a build-stamped date that moved on every deployment would tell you nothing.

Newsroom dispatches additionally name the specific developments that would require them to change. That list is the maintenance schedule: when one of those things happens, the page is revised and the revision is logged.