Research On Public Crisis Management Under The Context Of Social Media

The booming social media technology has been increasingly used in administrative managements,and greatly improved the wisdom in dealing with the frequently occurred public crises worldwide.However,the relevant academic research is still insufficient.Thus,the normative and empirical analysis are integrated to study the public crisis management issues under the context of social media from the perspectives of crisis communication,public crisis management system construction,crisis information dissemination,the self-regulation about rumors and the motivation of rumor combating behavior.Besides,some policy and institutional suggestions have been provided accordingly.The main conclusions and innovative points of the dissertation are as follows:(1)From the perspective of users,the channel function features of social media in crisis communication have been discussed.Text mining presents that crisis situation reports,personal situation reports,emergency preparedness and emotional expressions are the most common applications.Crosstab and Logistic regression analysis show that internal and external factors,namely,the user type(governments,traditional media,ordinary individuals and NGOs),the crisis stages(before,in and after the crisis)and characteristics of users(fans and weibo number),significantly influence and have a good power to predict social media application purposes.(2)Three crisis management systems(early warning and forecasting system,real-time management system and later-period recovery management system)have been built to comprehensively analyze the instrumental function of social media.It has been found that social media have strong application strengths in various public crisis management activities,such as crisis monitoring,crisis warning and forecasting,construction of new management organization with high resilience,information system maintenance,situation awareness,information issue and spread,opinion monitoring,crowdsourcing decision support,decision optimization,voluntary services,emotional support,etc.(3)Based on the infectious diseases models,the SEIR and SEIRC model are constructed to respectively analyze the dynamic process of information dissemination and rumor self-regulation on social media.Results show that the basic reproduction ratio is the key parameter in determining the model equilibrium state.The SEIR and SEIRC model will respectively reach the information-free equilibrium and the rumor-free equilibrium if the ratio is less than 1,and the information-endemic equilibrium and the rumor-endemic equilibrium if the ratio is bigger than 1.(4)With the integration of the theory of planned behavior and the norm activation model,the influencing factors and function mechanisms of the formation of social media users' rumor combating behavior during crises have been empirically studied.Results have shown that obstructive and incentive factors influence the actual behavior oppositely through two different kinds of gaps,namely “Higher awareness but lower behavior gap” and “lower attitude but higher behavior gap”.It's also demonstrated that the proposed model has a satisfactory level of prediction power for pro-social rumor combating behavior.In particular,subjective norms,perceived behavioral control and awareness of adverse consequences were the three most important predictors of actual rumor combating behavior.