Predictors of household disaster preparedness in California: Findings from a statewide telephone survey

Background: The impact of disasters on public health is significant and multifaceted. One means of reducing the impact of disasters is adopting emergency preparedness practices to decrease vulnerability and improve resilience. The goal of this analysis was to identify predictors of preparedness behavior, explore a theory-driven mechanism through which households prepare and examine whether preparedness behavior differed between race/ethnic groups or geographic areas in California households.

Methods: A statewide random-digit-dialing telephone survey was conducted with 2,081 California residents 18 years of age and older. Descriptive and inferential statistics were utilized to examine the dependent variable, preparedness actions. The independent variables tested, included the exogenous constructs of status (operationalized with income, education, gender and race/ethnicity), roles (operationalized with partnership and number of dependents) and disaster experience. The endogenous constructs tested were information types, information sources, information channels, cues and milling.

Results: A comprehensive model of disaster preparedness actions was developed. All of the variables remained statistically significant, except race/ethnicity, marital status, disaster experience and number of dependent children. Overall, the comprehensive model accounted for 54% of the variance in disaster preparedness actions reported in the survey. Effect modification was observed with interaction terms for geographic risk and race/ethnicity, however, this disappeared with subgroup analysis, which may have been an effect of sample size.

Conclusion: The proposed model contributes to the expansion of our understanding by presenting a causal mechanism for preparedness behavior. In turn, this mechanism has the ability to inform disaster research agendas and policy to reduce their impact.