Risk Perception And Emergency Management In Disastrous Events

An emergency disaster such as the Wenchuan Earthquake with the grade of8.0not only produces significant casualties and economic losses to people, but also makes victim-district residents perceive great risk, hence leads to emotional and psychological response, which brings a serious challenge to the emergency management of government. However, previous researchers focused on understanding the characteristics and theoretical frameworks of risk perception by qualitative and quantitative studies, there is still a remarkable lack of research jointly consideration of risk perception and sudden-onset disasters like earthquakes. Furthermore, there are very few literatures that systematically explore the impacts of various factors in earthquake on individual risk perception, psychological health, and coping behaviors.This research takes Wenchuan Earthquake as the empirical research base, via questionnaire survey and other research methodology, investigates the characteristics of risk perception and the factors that affect people’s risk perception. The research also reveals the relationships of risk perception with public demands, fear,. conformity and other psychological behaviors, and further provides valuable suggestions for risk communication and emergency management. The conclusions indicate that risk perception changes dynamically within time series, places and different groups of people. It was found that risk information in emergency disasters and the sense of controllability have significant impacts on risk perception. Fear and conformity varies among different groups of people, and have significant correlations with risk perception. From findings, public demands and their satisfaction influence public risk perception and psychological behaviors. And risk perception has an impact on public’s mental health status, optimism and confidence, positive coping behaviors and negative coping behaviors. The results suggest that risk perception is the core mediator variable that arouses a series of psychological and behavioral responses, and is the core variable should be taken into account for emergency risk management. The theoretical contributions of this research are listed as follows:(1) Systematically analyzing the dynamics of risk perception in emergency disasters, adding important supplements to risk perception theories.(2) Developing an integrate model of the relationships of risk perception and psychological behaviors in disaster from a systematic perspective.(3) Exploring the divergence of conformity among different groups of people, and is the first to build the relationships of conformity with risk perception, helplessness, fear and other psychological variables based on the background of emergency disasters, which makes important contribution to the explanation theories of conformity as well as extending its implication to a new situation.(4) Taking risk perception as a core concept and based on the discussion of the relationships among risk perception, fear, conformity, demand and other psychological behaviors, this research provides valuable suggestions for risk communication and emergency management in emergency disasters, which provides a new perspective of theoretical and implication basis for emergency management.