Designing more effective public education campaigns: Influences of sociodemographics, environment, and communication on disaster preparedness behavior

Disasters have the capacity to cause hundreds of thousand deaths, injury and displacement millions, and result in billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure and the environment. While readiness campaigns have been widely used in the past, they have failed to motivate preparedness to recommended levels leaving many households at risk during disasters. It is therefore imperative to understand what types of factors influence readiness in order to more effectively motivate behavior change. This study employed a theoretical approach to examining preparedness for both natural and man-made disasters. Two statistically representative samples were used: a random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone survey with 2,081 California residents to measure earthquake preparedness and a RRD survey with 3,300 U.S. residents to measure terrorism preparedness. Multivariate analyses tested whether preparedness was associated with information sources, information channels, information types, cues, and milling after accounting for disaster experience, geographic risk, gender, race/ethnicity, income, education, marital status, and number of children in both surveys. All communication theory covariates were statistically significant in every model for both earthquake and terrorism preparedness. Income, education, age, gender, and geographic risk were also statistically significant for earthquake preparedness, but only income was significant in the terrorism preparedness models. Sociodemographic and environmental factors contributed minimally to predicting preparedness compared to communication variables for both earthquakes (R2 = 6% vs. 48%, respectively) and terrorism (R2 = 1% vs. 36%, respectively). Thus, practitioners should consider using communication theory to design more effective preparedness campaigns, but they should be aware that other factors can influence behavior.