Risk Perception and Risk-Taking Attitude: A Comparison Between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Undergraduate Students

This paper compares risk perception and risk-taking attitude between Hong Kong and mainland China undergraduate students using a Chinese version of the 30-item domain-specific risk-taking (DOSPERT) scale (Blais and Weber 2006b). Compared with their counterparts from mainland China, Hong Kong university students reported higher levels of risk perception in the social, recreational, health/safety, and ethical domains. In contrast, mainland Chinese university students reported higher levels of risk-taking attitude than their Hong Kong counterparts in the social, recreational, health/safety, and financial domains. Regarding the interaction effects of location by gender, males reported higher levels of risk-taking attitude in the financial domain than did females for the Hong Kong sample, whereas the opposite was found for the mainland Chinese sample. Moreover, though females from both locations perceived higher levels of risk in the health/safety domain than did their male counterparts from the same location, the difference between genders was greater in the mainland Chinese sample than in the Hong Kong sample.