公众对地震的风险感知研究

Analysis of public risk perception on earthquake

为了探索影响公众对地震风险感知的关键因素,并分析该因素随时间变化的趋势,运用公众问卷调研法及多元统计法调查公众对地震的风险感知,并进行风险支付意愿的回归分析与时间维度下风险感知的差异性对比。研究表明,公众对地震的了解程度和感知到的威胁程度因时间发生显著变化,并影响公众对风险的感知态度。建议政府通过与公众的有效沟通以及加强立法,纠正公众的风险感知偏差,并将公众的风险感知纳入风险分析和政策决策中。

In this paper we characterize the perception of public in the north part of Jiangsu Province, China, towards one kind of natural disaster-earthquake based on the psychometric paradigm method. An organized questionnaire which contains the elements from this approach was administered to 300 respondents of Sihong, Xuyi and Hongze County in May 2008, shortly after the Wenehuan Earthquake and a total of 156 questionnaires were returned. Then in a second survey of July 2008, 500 respondents from the same research area were randomly chosen, with 318 questionnaires were collected. This research was designed to examine the attitudes and perceptions of people who did not directly experience the Wenchuan Earthquake. We have interested in how the attitudes and perceptions differ depending on gender, age, education and residential type as well as socioeconomic status, characteristics of seismic hazard such as social effect, benefit, controllability etc. The data collected was used to calibrate a muhiple liner regression in which the demographic and risk characteristics were set as independent variables. The results indicated 28.2% of variance in the respondents＇ willingness to accept （WTA） risk of earthquake. The results has also revealed that four variables--knowledge of risk, rarity of risk, fear of risk and trust in government have influenced the public＇s WTA on earthquake. At the same time, F-test was used to examine the equality of the four variables from the two surveys and the statistical processing has indicated a significant difference in knowledge of risk and fear of risk, which implied that these factors would change with time. The findings are helpful for the government to comprehend and predict the behaviors of people according to their demographic characteristics and preferences for seismic. The results revealed that the government should make the information of earthquake more available for individuals so that they could understand the direct and indirect severity of earthquake. Furthermore, a well designed communication of risks with public and effective mitigation policies are also necessary to improve public＇s rational risk judgment towards earthquake