An Empirical Study On Public’ Risk Perception On GM Food

The risk of Genetically Modified Food (GMF) has attracted numerous controversy and attention since the advent, and has once sparked public concern about the risk of GMF" Golden Rice Event" in2012. These subjective risk concerns tend to distort the objective food risk and strengthen the public response to risk or risk events, then influence the public’s behavior towards GMF risk. Therefore, investigating the public awareness and understanding of the GMF risk, exploring the influence factors of risk perception in the public have important theoretical and practical significance for revealing the source of controversy in GMF and building risk communication mechanism.Based on the risk social theory, cultural theory and governance theory, this paper want to understand the basic situation of Wuhan citizen and their cognition, attitude, involvement level and risk perception of GMF,etc. through the questionnaire, to describe the cognitive status of the public about the risk of GMF systematically, and adopts Factor Analysis Method to extract the dimension of public risk perception in GMF, then explores the factors that influence public risk perception of GMF with the use of Structural Equation Model. The results show:(1) Overall, the public do not have a severe concern about GMF safety problems in Wuhan city;(2) The public risk perception of GMF can be divided into four dimentions, namely health risk, environmental risk, social economic risk and product performance risk, among which, human health and environmental risk perception is relatively high;(3) GMF knowledge has impact on public risk perception; the person who has richer information and knowledge always has higher risk awareness;(4) The credibility of the government management of food safety, the trustworthiness of related scientists and media information can significantly reduce public risk of GMF;(5) The public with higher involvement level always have higher risk awareness;(6) Product knowledge, involvement level, and credibility factors influence public risk perception of GMF and there is a connection among the three;(7) Different groups have different risk perception about GMF.This study takes the controversial GMF as research object, exploring the risk of GMF from the perspective of the public. As to method selection, this paper adopts Structural Equation Model to explore the main factors affecting public risk perception of GMF, and reveal the relationship between various factors. The theme and method are innovative and exploratory.