Suchergebnisse

Experiences The Taxi The Setting The Story The Earring The Setting The Story The Honeymoon The Setting The Story The Ceiling The Setting The Story The Regulation The Setting The Story The Exercise The Setting The Story The Insights The Problem and Approach The Danger around You Is Increasing Population Movement Climate Change Potentials for Catastrophe The Many Faces of Disaster Natural Disasters Technological Disasters Conflict Disasters The Approach The Insights Hear That Siren? Who Panics and Why Neutralizing Threat Information Doing It Right But Not Everyone Responds the Same Females Child.

While professors in other sub-fields of sociology occasionally have incorporated fictional works into their courses, rarely, if at all, has this been attempted in disaster and hazard studies. This paper is a summary of one such effort including both the rationale and approach. Following discussion of context, a case example of an original fictional story is described including its origins and method of analysis. The story is rooted in an actual disaster and based on data obtained shortly afterwards. This approach provides both links to the humanities and greater depth of student understanding of core concepts, like multiorganizational coordination which is used in this case example. Through this strategy students enhance their ability to empathize with disaster responders and victims who too often are trapped in social structures that result in failure.

What social factors best predict the relative effectiveness of community disaster responses? This question is explored through interview and questionnaire data obtained from 62 local emergency managers whose communities were impacted by some type of disaster event. Various coordination strategies used in the year prior to the event and during the response were assessed first. These and numerous other potential sources of constraint were used in regression analyses to determine predictors of response effectiveness (both as perceived by the local emergency manager and through ten evaluative criteria). Results indicated that both measures of response effectiveness were predicted by seven factors: 1) high level of domain consensus; 2) use of more coordination strategies by the local emergency manager during the response; 3) more lengthy period of forewarning; 4) more frequent disaster training activities and actual responses during the prior two years; 5) more frequent participation by local emergency manager in local service organizations; 6) high community growth rate; and 7) use of more managerial strategies by the local emergency manager during the prior year.

When people are at work and they learn that disaster is imminent, what are their responses ? To what degree are there pattern differences in their response profiles because of event variations or structural features of the business firm for which they work? Interviews with employees (n = 406) of 118 businesses impacted by one of seven different recent disasters provide the first answers to these questions. While there were many interdependencies among three areas of constraint, analyses documented that many, but not all, aspects of employee evacuation behavior were patterned significantly by: (1) length of forewarning; (2) organizational size; and (3) organizational mission.

Over a decade has passed since the publication of Human System Responses to Disaster (Drabek 1986) in which findings from nearly 1,000 sociological studies were inventoried. This work, referred to by some as "the disaster encyclopedia, " is revisited in this essay through the exploration of three topics: (1) discussion of the origins of this essay and its structuring influences; (2) aspects of the inventory that should be retained; and (3) recommended areas of change.

For over three decades I have implemented alternative methodologies so as to pursue interesting research questions. My work has been guided by three goals: (1) test and extend sociological theory related to human response to disaster; (2) identify insights relevant to emergency management practitioners; and (3) communicate the results to both the academic and practitioner communities. In this essay three themes are developed: (1) a survey of the alternative methods I used in numerous disaster studies; (2) an evaluation of the state of disaster research; and (3) speculative thoughts regarding future directions, needs, and potentials.