An empirical study on hazardous chemicals risk of urban residents in China: Analysis of mediating effect and channel preference of response action decision model

Because urban residents do not have a strong understanding of hazardous chemicals, they cannot effectively make response action decisions to ensure safety, protect lives, and reduce prop-erty damage. This paper constructs the Response Action Decision Model of hazardous chemicals, and analyzes the mediating effect of Information Processing and Threat Perception, as well as channel preferences of urban residents with different demographic characteristics. A total of 1700 ques-tionnaires were collected in Chongqing, Tianjin, Fujian Zhangzhou, Shandong Zibo and Lanzhou, where there are significant hazardous chemicals factories. The results show that: Firstly, Information Processing and Threat Perception have significant mediating effects on the relationship between Mass Media, Social Media, Face-to-face communication and Response Action Decision in a single channel, which can effectively promote the spread effect of different channels, affecting the ways that urban residents make hazard response action decisions; secondly, Information Processing and Threat Perception do not have a mediating effect on the relationship between the channel com-bination of “Mass Media ↔ Social Media”, “Mass Media ↔ Face-to-face communication”, “Social Media ↔ Face-to-face communication” and Response Action Decision, and the channel combina-tion can directly link to the Response Action Decision; thirdly, in terms of the extent that it affects urban residents to make response action decisions, Mass Media is greater than Social Media and greater than Face-to-face communication; fourthly, two demographic characteristics of gender and experience have a stronger moderating effect for the Mass Media channel, while other demographic characteristics have greater influences on the Response Action Decision Model; finally, the Response Action Decision Model can be better applied to those analyses and research which address threat perception of hazardous chemicals and response action decisions of urban residents in China.