RAPID: Responding to the Risk of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma: Choices and Adjustment Over Time

以社区为基础的创伤是普遍和反复出现的，严重损害了个人福祉和社会资源。飓风“哈维”和随后的飓风“厄玛”都是这种以社区为基础的创伤的惊人例子。然而，令人惊讶的是，很少有研究考虑到这些集体和个人压力源的累积暴露如何随着时间的推移对调整模式做出贡献。社区创伤的影响可以跨越物理边界和时间边界，广泛的媒体报道传播创伤的影响远远超出了直接暴露的人群，并挑战了传统的创伤暴露观。设计和实施关于集体创伤的研究需要克服由于这些事件的根本不可预测性而产生的巨大的科学和后勤挑战。以前的研究对社区创伤的调整通常涉及在事件发生后很长时间的回忆，这使得很难消除创伤对随后调整的影响。要得出关于长期创伤反应的更可靠的结论，就需要有一个大样本，其中有关于事件前身心健康的信息，并在创伤反应的急性期收集心理反应的基线评估。该项目的研究人员在开发和维护这样一个样本方面一直处于最前沿（在美国国家科学基金会的事先支持下），并且能够在飓风哈维和厄玛的背景下利用样本和扩展数据收集。该项目提供了一个前所未有的机会，可以记录对哈维和厄玛飓风的反应变化的预测，并研究与风险评估和社区对自然灾害的反应有关的几个问题。媒体对这些飓风的空前关注，加上预先存在的大量代表性样本（在美国国家科学基金会的支持下），提供了检查调整过程、风险评估、灾难准备和行为变化的机会，而没有方法上的限制，这些限制一直困扰着以前的研究（例如，缺乏预数据、回顾性数据收集、小样本或人口统计学上的同质样本）。该研究将通过以下方式推进未来应对高压力事件的概念性工作：(a)进一步了解飓风的传统和非传统媒体报道可能在个人的风险感知和对其的急性压力反应中发挥作用的程度；(b)提供资料，以便及早查明在潜在的自然灾害之后可能遇到困难的个人；(c)提供在大规模威胁期间与公众沟通的关键信息；(d)为干预工作提供信息，以鼓励减灾行为（在威胁之前、期间和之后）；(e)明确整合压力与应对文献与决策文献。

Community-based traumas are pandemic and recurring, profoundly taxing individual well-being and societal resources. Hurricane Harvey, followed by Hurricane Irma, represent stunning examples of such community-based traumas. Yet surprisingly few studies have considered how cumulative exposure to collective and individual stressors such as these may contribute to patterns of adjustment over time. The effects of community traumas can span physical boundaries as well as temporal boundaries, with widespread media coverage transmitting a trauma's impact far beyond the directly exposed population, and challenging the traditional view of trauma exposure. Designing and implementing research on collective traumas requires overcoming formidable scientific and logistical challenges resulting from the fundamental unpredictability of these events. Previous studies that have examined adjustment to community traumas usually involve recalling events long after they have occurred, making it difficult to disambiguate the effects of trauma on subsequent adjustment. Drawing more solid conclusions about long-term trauma reactions requires having a large sample in which information about pre-event mental and physical health, and baseline assessments of psychological responses have been collected during the acute period of trauma responses. The investigators in this project have been at the forefront in developing and maintaining such a sample (with prior NSF support), and are able to utilize the sample and extend data collection in the context of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.This project presents an unprecedented opportunity to document predictors of variability in response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, as well as to examine several questions relevant to risk assessment and community response to a natural disaster. The unparalleled media attention to these hurricanes, coupled with the preexisting large representative sample on which a great deal of data has been collected prospectively (with prior NSF support), provides the opportunity to examine adjustment processes, risk assessments, disaster preparedness, and behavior change without the methodological limitations that have plagued prior research (e.g., lack of pre-data, retrospective data collection, small or demographically homogeneous samples). The research will advance future conceptual work on coping with highly stressful events by (a) furthering our understanding of the extent to which traditional and non-traditional media coverage of the hurricanes may play a role in individuals' risk perceptions and acute stress responses to it; (b) providing information to facilitate early identification of individuals at risk for subsequent difficulties following potential natural disasters; (c) providing information critical to communicating to the public during large-scale threats; (d) informing intervention efforts to encourage disaster-mitigation behaviors (before, during, and after threats); and (e) explicitly integrating the stress and coping literature with the literature on decision making.