Exploring on-line societal risk perception for harmonious society measurement

The nearly 30-year economic growth miracle brings the consequent tremendous poor-rich gap leading strong drives for social transformation in current China. Chinese top leaders have realized to increase the peoples’ income, improve quality of life and construct a “harmonious society” as key missions especially in recent 10 years. How to measure a harmonious society is one important topic as different measures may lead to different development policies. This paper outlines over 10 indices relevant to measure a harmonious society. Some are global indicators, while some are contributed by domestic researchers and arouse debates. Most of those indicators require conducting surveys on social attitudes under micro levels, which is always time consuming with problem of data quality. As Internet technology advances provide ways to record and disseminate fresh community ideas and thoughts conveniently, detecting topics or emotions from on-line public opinions is becoming a trend or one supplement way to overcome those data acquisition problems. This paper discusses one approach to on-line societal risk perception using hot search words and BBS posts. Such a trial aims to provide another way to societal risk perception different from those in traditional socio psychology studies. Challenges are also indicated.