Research On Behavioral Differences Of Public Participation In Crisis Aid In China

In the beginning of new century, modernization of China has stepped into a new stage, while reform and development has been in a critical period. In the process of industrialization and urbanization, more and more natural disasters, public health accidents, and public security accidents threat the social stability. How to utilize the strength of the public, with effective public involvement in public crisis management to minimize the economic loss and negative social impact brought by serious crisis events has become a new topic in the field of crisis management.As an important part of public participation in crisis management, public aid plays an important role in the rescue and relief efforts. However, most of previous researches on public involvement in crisis management focused mainly on the discussion of concepts, principles, and systems, which belong to qualitative analysis, except for few case studies. An obvious absence of empirical and quantitative approaches can be seen in the literature on status quo available, and this makes the structure of public crisis management system imprecise and impractical.With the data collected by questionnaires survey, this research takes an empirical study on the behavioral differences of public participation in crisis aid by correlation and variance analysis. And by drawing on the useful experiences of developed countries, some policy suggestions are given for the improvement of public participation and the establishment of a nationwide crisis response system. Contents and conclusions of the research include:1. Based on theories of Crisis Life Cycle and Altruistic Behavior, a series of hypothesis of crisis aid behavioral differences are made. As a crisis event can be divided into pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis, and crisis aid behaviors, an altruistic behavior may influenced by citizens'age, gender, occupation, education level, and income level factors, are in the latter two stages, different citizens may take different behaviors due to their demographic factors.2. With data collected by questionnaires, an empirical analysis is conducted to verify the hypothesis. The result shows that public citizens with different demographic factors do have significant variances on the crisis aid behaviors. Youth citizens are not positive in crisis aid behaviors; citizens with higher level of education are less positive than that with lower education; citizens of different occupations are positive in different behaviors; while citizens'donation grows with the increase of income level.3. Drawing on the experience of developed countries on improving public participation in crisis aid, and in view of the behavioral differences among groups of public citizens, the research gives policy suggestions for improving public participation in China including cultivation of crisis awareness, improvement of first-aid skills for crisis spot, development of donation culture, completion of laws and regulations for donation, and establishment of volunteer service for crisis aid system.