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Abstract Risk perception was the foundation of risk communication and risk management. Understanding the characteristics of risk perception and the factors that were able to affect risk perception was conducive to effective risk communication and risk management. This paper investigated the public health risk perception to PM2.5 and the credibility of information sources based on the psychometric paradigm. The result showed that the credibility was just in an intermediate level in general. The credibility of experts and NGOs was higher than the credibility of government. In the aspect of regional comparison, the credibility result based on residents in Beijing was lower than that based on residents in Nanchang, but the risk perception was higher. Then this paper constructed an influence mechanism model of risk perception based on the structural equation model. Result showed that credibility had negative effect on risk perception, and the coefficient of credibility based in Beijing and Nanchang was 0.244 and 0.183, respectively. The individual characteristics could directly and indirectly affect risk perception through credibility, and the total coefficient was 0.222 and 0.214 respectively. The individual characteristics included basic individual information (age, income, occupation), health condition (the number of children and the elderly, their own health condition, suffering from respiratory disease or not), residential location and the way of working.
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Received: 08 March 2015
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