Thank you for having me today. I will be talking about translating
hazard risk information for specific audiences,
examples of existing efforts, and lessons learned.
The takeaways from my talk today are that we, as a community of
researchers and practitioners, need to assess how communities,
specifically socially vulnerable or marginalized communities,
are receiving existing hazard risk information and resources and that
new risk communication efforts need to be developed in ways
that involve communities and consider their needs.
Today I’ll talk about how risk communication fits into this goal
of reducing disaster disparities. I’ll then talk about the relationships
between risk communication and action and some of the
potential barriers that certain communities might face.
And then, third and fourth, I’ll talk about two specific projects,
one looking at developing risk communication guidance for
practitioners and the second testing earthquake risk communication
strategies in Portland, Oregon. Both of these projects use
evidence-based practices to understand and evaluate
what kinds of risk communication we should be doing, and then both
are focused on working with socially vulnerable populations.
I’ll finish with a call to action.
As you know, disasters are a product of the hazards themselves,
but they’re also a product of the social, political, economic,
and environmental conditions in which they occur.
And, because these different conditions are different for different people,
we see inequitable impacts of disasters.
In a study by Howell and Elliott in 2019, who investigated the long-term
impacts of disasters on wealth inequality, they found that white, educated
households who had experienced a disaster actually gained significant
wealth compared to their peers who did not experience a disaster.
This is in contrast to Black, less-educated households who lost
tens of thousands of dollars compared to their peers
who had not experienced a disaster.
These results suggest that our response to disasters
and how we are planning for and recovering from disasters
is actually creating a lot of the inequity that we’ve seen.
And so how do we approach reducing some of these inequities?
So, to make these disaster impacts more equitable, we need to consider the
actions across all of these different areas. And, when I say equitable, I mean that
the disaster impacts would not be predicted by
someone’s individual characteristics, such as gender,
race, socioeconomic status, disability status, etc.
And so some ideas for how we might approach reducing these impacts include
identifying what are the inequities that we’re seeing, changing the policies
and systems to be more equitable, mitigating and preparing specifically
communities that are most at risk and most vulnerable, and implementing
adaptation strategies in those communities.
Re-thinking how we distribute disaster spending and aid and
how we allot money for projects. Developing better networks to
connect communities with resources and information.
And also to communicate risk in ways that communities can take action.
Today I’m going to focus on risk communication,
as that is my area of expertise.
Oftentimes, we make this assumption that, if we provide
information about hazard and risk, people will be able to understand
that information and then take action to reduce their risks.
But, in reality, it is much more complicated.
There’s many factors that control what kinds of actions people can take
or even if they have access to the information in the first place.
I’m going to use this model, which is the classic persuasion model developed by
Lasswell in 1948 to help us understand some of the factors that influence
whether people take action as a result of receiving information and
think about certain contexts for socially vulnerable populations
that may also influence how they’re able to act on information.
So here, if we start at the source, that is who is providing the information.
Is it coming form a government agency? Is it coming from
a friend or a colleague? And who that source is matters.
So, if a certain community does not trust the government, for example,
they’re much less likely to pay attention to that information.
Then we have the channel, and that’s the means by which
the information is delivered. So that could be through the radio,
through TV, through a lecture, or in person. And, depending on how
communities access different channels – for example, some communities may
listen to one specific radio station and not many others.
And so if you’re able to put your information on that station, that
community will hear the message. But, if you don’t, they probably won’t.
Then we have the message, which is the content of the information itself.
So that could be the length of the message, the reading level of the
message, whether it contains images or not, whether it’s in multiple languages
that different people can understand, whether it includes the risk but
also what to do about the risk.
All of those factors will control what people do with that information.
Then we have the receiver, which is probably the most complicated
piece of this and is the person who is receiving it and their characteristics.
So that could be the language that they speak, the physical strength, mobility,
vision, or hearing, their economic resources or social resources, and their
experience with hazards in the past. And all of those variables are going to
influence whether they receive a message. So, for example,
if a person has low levels of hearing and the message is going out through
an alarm, it’s unlikely that they’re going to be able to hear that message.
Then finally, we have the effect. So what do people do
with that information? And are they able to do anything?
And, depending on all of these factors that precede it, people may be able to
take a protective action, or they may need to seek out additional information.
So, for example, in a low-income community, if the recommended action
was to get earthquake insurance, it’s unlikely that that community
would be able to do that. And so they’d have to seek out
other ways of taking action.
In my research, I think about this model and think about ways to develop
different types of risk information strategies coming from a variety of
sources using different styles of messaging and using best practices to
create new resources that we can test. And then we assess those resources
with different types of communities and measure the impact and also
look at the factors that influence what kind of action was taken.
So now I’m going to talk specifically about two projects.
The first is risk communication guidance for practitioners,
which I believe Nnenia has already talked a little bit about.
And then the second is testing earthquake information materials
in Portland, Oregon.
So, in this first project, it’s been a collaborative project with
many people involved, so I want to acknowledge all of the people
who have already been a part of this project and talk a little bit about
this process for taking our best practices into actions.
So, yeah, the goal of this project was to take evidence-based
risk communication strategies that specifically look at
socially vulnerable populations and think about how we take that
information and those best practices and then guide that into practice.
And I think this is a really good example of a – of a model
for how we might do this. And so Nnenia and the team put
together these resources that include an annotated bibliography that really
synthesizes the risk information research and puts together a really nice resource
that really just summarizes the information that we have on that topic.
They then put together a guide that puts that research into the context of the
disaster lifecycle and provides examples and also isolates it into these three
simple messages, which are communicate through familiar and
trusted messengers; provide clear, actionable information;
and tailor messages and information pathways for target audiences.
The third step of this process was then taking this information and
creating a series of worksheets so practitioners or people who are working
on a risk communication project could use these worksheets to think about how
they are approaching the project and how they might be involving
these communities in the work that they’re doing.
And now, as a final part of the project, or a next part of the project,
I should say, I’m developing a series of training sessions for flood plain
practitioners to think about how we gather all these materials that have
already been developed and then put them into practice.
So we’re really taking these worksheets and the other guides that are available
to apply these principles in specific contexts.
So this will be a succession course, and it’s an opportunity for practitioners
to come together, work with their peers on these projects, ask questions,
and really think through how we apply these principles.
Another piece of this project will be doing a pre- and post-survey with the
participants to see how this class went and if it really did help them think about
applying these principles and assessing that six months later to see if the
projects that they are working on continued to incorporate these ideas
in them. So I’m excited to carry out this course this spring,
and hopefully we’ll have some data on how it went, probably this summer,
to look at, so stay tuned.
The next project is focused on Portland, Oregon, and it’s looking at assessing
the influence of cultural variables, perceptions, and earthquake hazard
information on household emergency preparedness.
And I worked with Dr. Brittany Brand and Mike Lindell,
and this is through my Boise State position.
For this project, we brought together evidence-based risk communication
strategies and the involvement of local partners and organizations to help
develop, gather, and assess which existing resources and new resources
we want to develop around hazards and risk education in the region
and then test those resources with people in their community
and measure the effectiveness of those resources.
So we’ve developed two resources so far – or, gathered two resources
associated with an existing booklet, which is the Prepare! Resource Guide
developed by the Red Cross, and then we developed a best practice hazards
website called hazardsready.org that allows people to type in their address
and find out what their hazard risk is for where they live and what to do
to prepare. And both of these resources are available in English and Spanish.
And we’ve tested them using a pre- and post-survey design and are
still analyzing some of that data and hoping to have that available soon.
The third part of this is testing an interactive workshop specifically
working with the Latino communities in the region who are considered
a socially vulnerable and marginalized community.
And I’m going to talk about the workshops today and
some of the lessons learned. We are really early on in developing
these workshops right now, so I don’t have any results to show you today,
but mostly just talking about our experience involving partners and
some of their recommendations so far that has guided our work.
The goals of these workshops are to involve community members
and participants to discuss the Cascadia earthquake and associated
hazards to help people personalize their risk and to use goal-setting
strategies to motivate action.
And, as we’ve been developing these workshops, we want them to be
really interactive and really fun for the community to participate in
while they can also learn information.
And so, as part of developing the workshops, we really wanted to involve
and learn from community partners in terms of what the Latino population
would resonate with as we were developing the workshop.
And so I want to thank our partners who we’ve had a number of meetings
with so far – Luis, Pilar, Marvin, and Cynthia
for their contributions and ideas and time.
And I’m just going to share a couple of the takeaways
that we’ve had from our work with them.
The first thing that they recommended after reviewing our set of PowerPoint
slides and information was that it was best to not have an expert providing
this material but rather a facilitator. They mentioned that, for their
community, having that power differential of someone who has a Ph.D.
in the room providing this information just is unlikely to resonate with them.
And people are less likely to engage, ask questions, or feel comfortable
just participating in the workshop. So, because of this, we’ve really pivoted
from being the ones who were going to deliver the information to contracting
with community-based organizations and partners who will be the ones
facilitating the workshop. So we’ve pivoted to more of
a train-the-trainer style of delivery.
We’ll still be providing the surveys before and after and then –
but we’ll be having someone else deliver the content.
So that was just a really valuable recommendation from them.
The second is to make recruitment strategies that really consider their
community needs, so providing incentives, whether that’s childcare
or food, if it was going to be in person, and for their community, really making
it a community event, making it fun, really marketing it as a thing that
people can come together for, is going to be important
for the Latino community there.
So we’ve been thinking about which ways we can market it in that way.
And then the third point they had was really to keep it short.
We had originally been planning on having it be about 90 minutes, and they
said, you know, they’ve done that before, and it just didn’t really land.
And so consolidating the information and really making it
short and sweet is probably the best bet with their community.
So, as a result, we are revising the content that we put together to
make a little bit more digestible and shorter for their community.
So I just want to encourage everyone that making connections
with community partners, it takes time, but it is so worth it.
And hopefully, as a result, these workshops will have more of
an impact in the community in terms of reducing disaster risk.
So my takeaways, again, are that, if we want risk communication to
translate into action for communities that are socially vulnerable to reduce
disaster risks, we really need to think about how we’re assessing the
information that we’re currently providing, whether it’s effective,
and involve communities in our efforts as we are developing
new risk communication strategies.
My final question I want to leave you with is, considering your roles, skills,
and expertise, how can you best engage and support communities
to reduce disaster risks and make impacts more equitable?
Whether it’s through risk communication or any of those
other areas I mentioned, I think we each have a role and a way to do this.
So thank you so much for your time. I so appreciate it.