Collaborative Research: An Examination of Household Risk Assessment Judgments and Protective Action Decision during Tornado Threats

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This project will improve understanding of the kinds of information people seek when facing a tornado threat, how the information they obtain affects their risk perceptions, and the way that their risk perceptions affect their protective actions. This project will have a number of positive impacts to the broader society. Experimental materials (including software) will be made publicly available to a range of researchers, including those from under-represented groups, so that other studies may augment and extend the approach developed here. The project also includes extensive outreach to professional broadcast meteorologists and to organizations such as the National Weather Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and state and local government emergency management agencies in order to inform how weather-related risks are communicated to the public. This project will introduce two major innovations into research on protective action decision making (here, in the context of tornado-related risk). First, in a departure from conventional, exclusively survey-based studies, human-in-the-loop experiments incorporating computer-based dynamic decision making exercises will be used. Alternative protective actions (such as seeking additional information, shelter in-place, or evacuating) will be investigated by examining detailed logs of participant interaction with the computer-based simulation. Second, this project will overcome a limitation of previous studies that have focused solely on individuals by comparing decision processes by individual with those of pairs (here, married couples). This work is therefore expected to reveal how interpersonal ties help determine protective actions in households.