Risk Distribution, Trust Of Systems And Risk Perception An Empirical Study On Infants' Parents' Perception Of Food Safety Risks In Xiamen City

Since 1980's, scholars in western countries began the study of risk perception with a view to understand the public's subjective attitude and evaluation of the risks which affect their daily social life. Now the research has extended to a variety of risk areas after 20years' development. In this thesis, we focused on food safety risks. Base on the searching of factors affecting risk perception, we took risk distribution as bedrock, probing into the relationship between trust of systems and risk perception, so as to afford empirical support for risk communication.This article analyzed field data from an investigation on infants' parents' perception of food safety risk after food safety incident happened. The research was conducted in Xiamen city. The outcomes indicated that we are now living in a risk society; the level of the people's perception of food risks was high. The results of regression analysis of showed that individuals' perception of food safety risks was influenced by following factors: registered residence, educational background, household income, factual risk distribution and trust of systems. By further testing, the study found out that experiences of both past risk and previous risk incidents would affect individuals' perception of risks. So risk perception was constructed by experiences. The most significant conclusion of the study was the negative relationship between trust of systems and risk perception. In another words, the more the public trusted systems, the lower they perceived the risks. This result could be particularly demonstrated by the positive relationship between trust of government and scientist and perception of risks' controllability, and the negative relationship between trust of government and market and perception of risks' seriousness.Concerning the fragility of trust of systems and its significance for risk perception, the thesis raised suggestions for policy. In order to keep the public's rationality concerning risk perception, institution of risk communication based on trust should be developed. Still the ability of policy makers to manage and control risks should be improved.The thesis could be helped to make up the disadvantages of risk perception study in our country, such as less empirical research, and low level of normalization. The innovation of the thesis was the combination of the psychometric paradigm and sociological paradigm and the introduction of risk distribution and trust of systems to the study of risk perception. By constructing the relationship between them, greater theoretical and practical meanings of study on risk perception could be explored.