Influencing Factors Of Public Health Risk Perception In COVID-19 Crisis

As a major public health crisis,COVID-19 itself is highly uncertain and complex.Therefore,the public’s perception of the risk of COVID-19 is also complex and multi-dimensional,and has obvious subjective characteristics.Previous experience in infectious disease research has shown that the public’s accurate perception of risk is the key to the success of infectious disease prevention and control measures.In this context,it is of great practical significance to understand the public’s perception of epidemic risk for epidemic prevention and control.Starting from the individual differences in risk perception,this study takes the social amplification framework of risk as the theoretical basis and uses the data of questionnaire survey(N=707)to analyze the degree of individual risk perception and its influencing factors.This study attempts to provide a useful analytical framework to integrate the communication,psychological,social and cultural factors that contribute to the collective interpretation of individual differences in risk perception in COVID-19 crises.It is found that the general risk perception of the public is low at this stage.Among the predictive variables,individuals’ social media exposure,interpersonal discussion scale,individual-communitarian worldview,fatalism belief,mandatory norms,government trust,self-efficacy and personal experience significantly affected risk perception.The higher the individual’s social media exposure,the larger the scale of interpersonal discussion,the stronger the fatalism belief,the higher the degree of mandatory norms,and the higher the self-efficacy,the higher the risk perception.The higher the individual’s trust in the local government,the lower the risk perception;Individuals with a communitarian worldview and individuals with COVID-related experience had higher risk perception.Largely on the significance of this study is to provide a new framework to explain the new epidemic crisis risk perception of individual differences,it is considered from the perspective of a more comprehensive new crown outbreak during the crisis of health risks,and provide risk communication strategy based on empirical research,provides the reference for emergency information management strategies.