| China is moving towards industrialization and urbanization period of rapid development, with long-term accumulated environmental problems unresolved but new environment contradictions emerging, natural disasters and environmental risks caused by various human activities continue to increase and pose a great threat on human health and the environment. Besides, environmental risks will lead to group conflicts which threaten the long-term social stability and social development. Therefore, environmental risks have become a hot issue among the environmental experts, as well as an urgent problem that the state should urgently solve. The State Environmental Protection "five" plan has taken preventing environmental risks as one of the four strategic task.At present, foreign research on environmental risk perception is much more than that of domestic. Domestic environmental risk perception research pays more attention to the social risks and natural disasters, as well as concrete risk items, there is no research on risk perception among different categories of environmental risk. Considering that individuals may have similar cognitive characteristics towards some similar environmental risks, putting these risks into one category can better analyze the environmental risks. Then research on the public's risk perception of different categories of environmental risks to find out whether there are differences and the influencing factors and give targeted risk communication proposal on each category has certain theoretical and practical significance.Based on theoretical analysis on the foreign and domestic research results related to risk perception, measurement methods and environmental risk influencing factors, we find influencing factors of public‘s environmental risk perception include the characters of risks, individual characteristics and social influencing factors which often become the flow of information and influence the risk perception of the public. This paper is based on the risk society theory, cultural theory of risk and risk communication theory, with the method of classical measurement of risk perception- Psychometric Paradigm. With Wuhan university students for the study objectives, we have designed and conducted a survey.The main conclusions drawn from the data analysis include: Respondents' risk perception of three categories of environmental risks have significant differences, with harmful substances highest, followed by the new technology risk, and natural disasters the lowest. Mean scores of the three types of environmental risk are lower than 3 which means they are perceived serious. Three categories of risk also have significant differences in the specific risk dimensions.By factor analysis method, two-dimensional model- "fear" and "known" is found which is similar to Slovic's classical two-factor model. Influencing factors of three types of environmental risk include risk concerns, the amount of media coverage, the media's credibility, having the risk experience or not, gender, major, from the urban / rural. Risk concerns and risk knowledge are significantly associated with three categories of environmental risks; the amount of media coverage has no correlation with the new technology risk, but is significantly associated with other two categories of risk perception; media credibility were significantly associated with three categories of environmental risks; gender has no significant correlation with harmful substances risk but has it with new tech risk and natural disasters. Major is significantly associated with the three types of environmental risks. From urban or rural is correlated with none categories of environmental risks. Having risk experience or not has no significant correlation with natural disasters but has with the new technology category and the hazardous substances. For analysis, the paper has also proposed communication suggestions separately for each category of environmental risk as to provide useful advice for specific risk communication practice. |
PDF Full Text Request