Risk Perceptions Following a Substandard Vaccine Crisis in China: An Exploratory Approach to Substantiating the Tripartite Model

Abstract

Understanding the risk perception is essential to explaining people’s judgment and decisions during drug safety crises. In addition to affective and cognitive components, the experiential facet of risk perception captures “gut-level” reactions in heuristic-based risk judgments. However, few empirical studies have explicated the validity of the tripartite approach to analyzing risk perception or examined whether experiential risk perception is a conceptually sound construct distinct from the well-established dual-factor model. Building upon the tripartite model of risk perception, this study acknowledges the current research gap and compares three fundamental components of risk perception as well as their relative capabilities to predict individuals’ behavioral intention. Results of an online survey conducted shortly after a substandard vaccine crisis in China empirically support the discriminant validity of the tripartite model, which exhibits significantly better model fit than either single-factor or dual-factor models. A pretest-posttest analysis has further identified a highly controversial gap between experiential and affective risk perceptions: instructional risk message stimuli have provoked a significant change in participants’ experiential risk perception but not in the other two components. Moreover, three dimensions of risk perception reveal different patterns of association with behavioral intention. Implications for risk and crisis management are further discussed.