Informing the population of Russia in the sphere of the ambient air quality

Abstract

Introduction. To build up an effective system for distributing information about ambient air quality it requires taking into accounts certain peculiarities related to people perceiving specific data. Purpose. To describe population’s information interests in ambient air quality to make information spreading more effective. Materials and methods. Our empirical base included the following items: a) publicly available data on search requests in Yandex provided by “Wordstat.yandex.ru” service over the period from February 01, 2020 to January 31, 2021; b) one hundred seventy six forum posts from October 2018 to June 2020 with comments to them which dwelled on ambient air quality and related issues and were placed on Internet forums of Russian cities. Results. We established that Internet users in Russia didn’t have any significant interest in issues related to ambient air pollution. People in most cities which were considered “large industrial centers” tended to be more interested in ambient air quality. Such an interest most frequently occurs due to environmental factors being perceived as certain threats for human health and wellbeing. Consequently, this topicality of environmental issues results in different intensity of information interests in the sphere which tend to be greater among people living in industrially developed cities than among those living in smaller settlements. Limitations. This study has limitations related to the time period of the studied search queries and territorial specifics. Conclusion. A system for information distribution should give a possibility to react operatively to ‘emotional signals’ given by population in electronic communications. Information messages should be composed relying on key semantic constructions of a simple everyday language.