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Explaining the perceived justice of disaster relief policy: An empirical study based on the 2008 W enchuan E arthquake in C hina
Author(s) -
Zhang Huan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
international journal of social welfare
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.664
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1468-2397
pISSN - 1369-6866
DOI - 10.1111/ijsw.12050
Subject(s) - economic justice , distributive justice , government (linguistics) , empirical research , perception , interpersonal communication , procedural justice , feeling , economics , public economics , demographic economics , business , political science , social psychology , psychology , law , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , neuroscience
The C hinese government issued generous relief policies after the W enchuan E arthquake. However, according to my survey, 20.32 per cent ( n = 1,949) of the earthquake victim‐survivors felt that they were treated unfairly in receiving government assistance after the earthquake. In the present study, a perceived justice framework was established to explain the victim‐survivors’ perception of justice of the disaster relief policy in C hina and several hypotheses were developed. The hypotheses were tested empirically using household survey data of the W enchuan E arthquake. The empirical study found that perceived justice, which is composed of three dimensions (distributive justice, interpersonal justice and informational justice), could directly assess the effect of the disaster relief policy. The results of the empirical study also demonstrated that the most important principle of the disaster relief policy was ‘need distribution’, which was also the most important factor of perceived justice. The study concluded that it is imperative to improve victim‐survivors’ feeling of fairness, policy information delivery and their expectations management when implementing a disaster relief policy.