Analysis of public risk perception on earthquake

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 Wenchuan 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 multiple 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