3.2. Public Flood Risk Perception in Four Districts in Jingdezhen
The public flood risk perception was compared among four districts. Here, the
p value was less than 0.05 (
Table 4), which showed that the public flood risk perceptions among four districts were statistically significant. Therefore, the comparison of scores between the four districts afterwards was credible and reliable.
When asked about the flood impact, the respondents in Jingdezhen City showed different flood risk perception level. As shown in
Figure 2, more than half the respondents selected “medium impact”, accounting for 50.3%, and they thought the flood affected their daily life and work but not serious. And 27.1% of the respondents thought that they were largely affected by the flood, causing inconvenience to life and some loss of property, sometimes unable to work or shutdown. Besides, 4.3% of the respondents felt strongly affected by the flood, and they thought their lives and work were greatly affected and sometimes life-threatening property-damaging. On the contrary, “somewhat impact” and “no impact” recorded a small percentage. In specific, 13.5% of respondents thought they were affected by the flood, but this situation only lasted a very short time and 4.7% of the respondents never felt affected by the flood.
The specific difference of flood risk perception was compared among four districts in Jingdezhen City. As shown in
Table 4, the mean score of flood risk perception for the respondents in the Jingdezhen City was 3.13. This represented the level of flood risk perception among the Jingdezhen City was not high, close to medium level. Among the four districts, Changjiang District had the highest score of flood risk perception, which was 3.24, 0.11 higher than the whole city average level. In the actual investigation, this may be because the area is the city center, where the wealth and population density are large, and the damage that is caused by the disaster was serious in the past. Meanwhile, some streets and plazas got flooded every year, resulting in a high flood risk perception among the respondents in Changjiang District. The lowest score of flood risk perception was 2.65 in Leping County. This may be due to the respondents in Leping County thought the flood was not a serious disaster. The possible reason is 71.2% of the respondents in Leping County experienced less than one flood every two years (
Table 3). With less likelihood of future flood as well as the less flood experience, people in Leping County might believe that flood risk had lower importance. In addition, the flood risk perception in Zhushan District and Fuliang County were similar, being 3.12 and 3.11, respectively.
Overall, these results showed that the respondents in the whole Jingdezhen city had a medium level of flood risk perception, and there were large differences among four districts with the respondents in Changjiang District having the highest flood risk perception while the respondents in Leping County had the lowest.
3.3. Impact Factors of Public Flood Risk Perception
ANOVA was conducted to examine and analyze the links between the impact factors and public flood risk perception in Jingdezhen City (as shown in
Table 5). In this study, the impact factors were related to:
individual socio-demographic characteristics and
other four important factors. 95% confidence interval was used. When the p < 0.05, it means the impact factor would influence the flood risk perception.
The ANOVA results showed that the impact factors, such as district, gender, age, education level, income per month, flood experience, flood knowledge education, flood protection responsibility and trust in the government have significant relationships with the flood risk perception. Only the occupation factor has insignificant relationship with
p > 0.05. Then, Post Hoc Tests was conducted to find the flood risk perception differences between different groups under the same impact factor among all respondents (
Table 6).
As far as the district was concerned, the above analysis has found that there was a statistically significant difference between the flood risk perceptions in four districts in Jingdezhen City (see
Table 4 and
Table 5). Compared with other three districts, the respondents in Changjiang District perceived the highest flood risk. Besides, the respondents in Leping County showed the lowest flood risk perception, and this may be because they did not think the flood risk was very important and they believed that the likelihood of future flood in this area was very low.
With regard to gender, the female respondents had higher flood risk perception than the male respondents (
p < 0.05). This is because women had lower socioeconomic status than men and were more vulnerable when facing the floods, which caused women to be more willing to seek flood information, pay more attention to property losses, and more likely to take self-protection measures in advance. Therefore, female perceived higher flood risk than male. This result was in line with the findings in most published studies [
4,
48].
In this study, there was a significant positive correlation between age and flood risk perception. In general, the older the respondent, the higher the flood risk perception level. Among the age groups, the respondents aged 51–70 years old had the highest flood risk perception comparing with other age groups younger than 51 years old. This may be because the respondents aged 50–71 years old experienced many historical serious floods and more likely to take the responsibilities in family safety. So, they perceived higher flood risk than other age groups. These results were similar to the findings in most published studies [
4,
48], although some studies thought that age negatively influenced the flood risk perception [
43].
It can be seen from
Table 6 that the respondents with higher education level had lower flood risk perception. The respondents with bachelor’s degree had lower flood risk perception than those with primary school degree, middle school degree, or high school degree. Meanwhile, there was no big difference between bachelor and master or above. Relevant studies also confirmed the significance of education for risk perception with negative correlation [
16]. Ho et al. thought that people with higher education level had lower risk perception because highly educated people were more likely to better understand the flood information and government flood mitigation actions, and thus might feel a higher degree of controllability over a disaster [
7].
With regard to the occupation factor, in this study, it had no statistically significant relation to the flood risk perception of the respondents. But, from the empirical data, the self-employed respondents had the highest flood risk perception. This may be because, for the self-employed respondents, the damage caused by the flood needs to be borne by themselves. In the relevant studies, Arnaud et al. revealed that, when discussed about the flood risk reduction, the factor of occupation was never significant [
49].
With regard to the monthly income of the respondents, in general, higher educated people had higher income and thus their relation to the flood risk perception was similar. This study found that the respondents with lower income per month showed higher level of risk perception for flood. Compared with the respondents whose average monthly income was less than ¥2000, other three groups had poorer flood risk perception (
p < 0.05 for all). This result was similar to the findings in some previous studies [
43]. For example, Kellens et al. reviewed many relevant studies and found that there was a negative correlation between income and risk perception [
50,
51], though statistical significance was often absent [
7,
16,
52].
The flood experience of the respondents had been found to be positively correlated with the flood risk perception and it was highly significant in this study, i.e., those with more flood experiences had higher flood risk perception than those with less flood experiences. The respondents experienced more than 2 times flood every year had the highest flood risk perception compared to other three groups. This was because people with more flood experience had more knowledge and better understanding of historical floods, and they were more likely to seek flood information and take measure to protect themselves. In fact, in our field research, it was discovered that the residents who were often affected by disasters made small flood control facilities in front of their homes, stored food during the flood season, and established mutual assistance agreements between neighbors. These results were also confirmed by the studies of Pagneux et al. [
53] and Kellens W et al. [
4].
With regard to the flood knowledge education, the flood knowledge is generally found strongly related to the feeling of security. Individuals with little knowledge of the causes of floods had lower flood risk perception [
9]. In this study, it has a similar result that the individuals with more flood knowledge education showed higher flood risk perception. Compared with the respondents who received more flood knowledge education, the other three group showed lower flood risk perception. But the difference between the three groups (“Never”, “Few” and “Medium”) were small, while the gaps between the group of “Many” and other three groups were large. This means that the level of public flood risk perception would be improved only after a certain amount of flood knowledge education. Thus, the government need to adhere to more flood knowledge education.
The view of flood protection responsibilities has been found that can influence the public flood risk perception [
33]. In this study, the respondents who believed themselves should be responsible for the flood protection showed higher flood risk perception than other groups. The reason may be that people who feel responsible for taking protective actions usually doubt the effectiveness of ‘public’ protective measures [
34], thus, they perceived higher flood risk perception and preferred to take self-protection measures. Besides, the difference between other groups were not big. These results also reflect the fact that raising public responsibility for flood protection is very helpful for flood mitigation and risk management.
With regard to the trust in the government, it was found to be negatively related to the flood risk perception in this study (see
Table 6). The respondents held the “Very low” trust in the government perceived highest flood risk than other three groups (
p < 0.05 for all). The reason may be that trust in the government is represented by the trust of the government, experts, and the mass media [
26]. The high level of trust showed that the respondents believe that the government can cope with flood hazards and do not need to do too much preparedness themselves. People who have lower trust in the government do not believe that the government can issue early flood warning and timely rescue. Instead, they choose to actively understand flood knowledge, seek flood information, and take measures to protect themselves. These results also were confirmed in most published studies [
27,
54].