Modeling Public’s Protective Behavior Response From The Perspective Of Risk Perception

Public’s protective actions make huge differences in crisis situation. There are many options available to the decision-makers, such as information-seeking behavior, disseminating information, buying protective equipments, evacuation from hazardous areas, etc. A great deal of researches has proved that protective behavior is determined by public’s risk perception. So, the purpose of this study is to investigate decision makings on protective actions from the perspective of risk perception. Firstly, this article sought to explore how the public perceive crisis information from news reports. We proposed a mathematical model to describe and investigate public risk perception by simulation analyses. The simulations were carried out using the mathematical software MATLAB, and then compared with public risk perception in three patterns of news reports which were selected from the Website of SINA.com in China. Secondly, in order to examine its influence on decision-making, an individual’s memory-based decision-making system is developed, and then we integrate the multi-agent decision systems and construct a sequential risky decision model on the basis of informational cascade. This study aims at exploring public’s decisions on whether or not to take protective actions under risk. Thirdly, this paper describes and identifies the rules of public’s disaster information needs in the aftermath of Wenchuan Earthquake. This study proposed a theoretical framework to describe public’s information needs from three aspects that included the users, information behaviors and the required information. Based on demonstrating the feasibility of using the TV ratings as the measurement of information demands, the TV ratings data are collected from CSM Media Research to explore how public’s information needs change when a disaster happens. Finally, This study, based on Health Belief Model (HBM) and Protective Action Decision model (PADM), examines public risk perceptions and their response to the pandemic influenza (H7N9). Data were collected during the month of July2013by personally handing over the questionnaires to inhabitants and residents in Hefei, Huainan, Huaibei, Suzhou, Bozhou and Guangde city of province Anhui in China. The main results are included as follows:,(1) Public had different perceptions of what caused the crisis depending on the type of news report. Public risk perceptions developed dynamically and the process can be divided into three general stages:the sensitive period, the rational period and the forgotten period.(2) People with different strength of ties to friends and relatives make huge differences on decision-making. In the group with weak ties, the agent’s total size of decision information and the level of risk perceptions are reducing in the sequential decision process. We further prove that people with weak ties are more prone to take no protective action, and the probability is also decreasing with the decision turn. The sequence of people with strong ties makes decisions dynamically with the intensity of released information. Finally, the influences of forgetting rate and memory capacity on people’s decision-making are examined.(3) The capacity of the public’s information needs and behaviors is constant and relatively rational regardless of the disaster happened. The occurrence of the disaster drives the focus of public’s information demands to be transformed from the entertainment to crisis information, while the information needs on life service and educational shows fairly stable. Besides, the age, education and occupation have significant influences on the amount of public’s information needs.(4) Sharing a restroom with the patient received the highest hazardous rating of likelihood of getting infected, rather than touching the birds and animals. Individual’s compliance with recommended behavior was identified, and assessed by the ratings on the six hazard-related and resource-related attributes of seven protective actions. The profiles of the information sources demonstrate that local health department personnel, provincial or national public health department personnel were high in protection responsibility, expertise and trustworthiness. People are more likely to comply with the recommended behavior from these sources. In addition, since the females and the people with past experience of taking protective actions tend to comply with protective recommendations, it’s very essential for local officials to adopting audience segmentation strategies during H7N9emergency.These findings have implications for emergency management and highlight the importance of considering public perception of risk when handling emergencies. Besides, the constructed protective action decision-making model also provides a new line of thought about building multi-agent system of DMP, which is also very helpful for the design of information management system during emergencies. This research of public’s TV viewing behavior provides a new idea to how to quantitatively measure public’s information needs and empirical evidence on the dynamic changing regularity of public’s information needs. These findings also have implications for improving efficiency of emergency information dissemination and public responses to the coming risk.