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Scientific Information Research

Keywords

public emergency; response; transparency; empathy; public acceptance

Abstract

[Purpose/significance]Regarding the responses to public emergencies published by official agencies on social media, this study aims to measure information transparency and empathy in the response text, and further to investigate their influence on public acceptance of responses. [Method/process]This study used public emergency responses published on Sina Weibo, a Chinese popular social media, as data source. Through carefully collecting and filtering, we finally acquired 170 public emergency responses released from 2021 to 2023. Furthermore, by using methods of content analysis, manual coding, and natural language processing, we measured information transparency of responses from three aspects: information disclosure, information accuracy, and information clarity; Meanwhile, we measured empathy in a response based on its used positive and negative emotional words and affective words. Moreover, the influence of information transparency and empathy of responses on public acceptance was investigated by employing negative binomial regression analysis method. [Result/conclusion]The results show that increasing transparency of responses generally significantly affects public acceptance. However, the strength and direction of the effect varies depending on the content of the specific response information and the linguistic expressions. In addition, excessively expressing empathy in responses negatively affects public acceptance. The findings of this study help enriching theoretical research results in the field of public emergency and crisis communication management, and provide a reference for official agencies to determine the content of a public emergency response and its linguistic expressions.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.19809/j.cnki.kjqbyj.2024.04.006

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