RAPID: Responding to the Risks of the 2018 Hurricane Season: Choices and Adjustment Over Time

飓风每年都威胁着美国。然而，2017年和2018年的飓风季节尤其具有破坏性。2017年，美国不同地区受到前所未有的连续飓风哈维和厄玛的威胁。2018年，飓风佛罗伦萨和迈克尔在几周内相继登陆美国东海岸。总之，数百万居民直接受到这些风暴的影响，还有数百万人通过广泛的媒体报道间接受到影响。这些飓风代表了以社区为基础的反复创伤的惊人例子，但令人惊讶的是，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有助于调整模式。社区创伤的影响也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这些事件的根本不可预测性所带来的重大科学和后勤挑战。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，这使得很难理解创伤对随后的调整的影响。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，在事件发生前就有关于心理和身体健康的信息，同时还要对创伤反应急性期收集的心理反应进行基线评估。该项目的研究人员一直在开发和维护这样一个样本（在美国国家科学基金会的事先支持下），并能够利用已有的样本在2018年飓风季节的背景下进行后续数据收集。该项目将追踪佛罗里达州、德克萨斯州和纽约大都会地区3000多名居民的代表性样本，这些居民在2017年飓风哈维和伊尔玛过后接受了调查。它提供了一个重要的机会，可以记录2018年飓风季节变化的预测因素，并研究与风险评估和社区应对自然灾害相关的几个问题。具体来说，在2018年飓风季节之后，将审查调整过程、风险评估、备灾和行为改变。先前的研究受到严重的方法限制，包括缺乏预数据、回顾性数据收集、小样本或人口统计学上的同质样本。当前的项目通过整合先前的数据收集，使用更多的同期评估，并从大量不同的样本中提取，避免了这些限制。这项研究将在许多方面推进未来应对高压力事件的概念性工作。它将进一步加深我们对飓风的传统和非传统媒体报道可能在个人风险感知和压力反应中发挥作用的程度的理解。它将提供信息，以便及早查明在潜在的自然灾害之后可能面临后续困难的个人。它将识别在大规模威胁期间与公众沟通的关键信息。它将为干预工作提供信息，以鼓励（在威胁之前、期间和之后）减轻灾害的行为。最后，通过整合有关压力的研究文献和应对决策的重要知识体系，提高基础知识。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Hurricanes threaten the United States every year. Yet the 2017 and 2018 hurricane seasons were especially devastating. Different parts of the U.S. were threatened by unprecedented back-to-back Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017. Hurricanes Florence and Michael made landfall on the east coast of the U.S. within weeks of one another in 2018. In all, millions of residents were directly affected by these storms and millions more were indirectly exposed through extensive media coverage. These hurricanes represent stunning examples of repeated community-based traumas, but surprisingly few studies have considered how the cumulative exposure to collective and individual stressors such as these may contribute to patterns of adjustment over time. The effects of community traumas can also span physical boundaries as well as temporal ones, 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 significant 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 understand the effects of trauma on subsequent adjustment. Drawing more solid conclusions about long-term trauma reactions requires having a large sample on which information about mental and physical health prior to the event is available, along with baseline assessments of psychological responses collected during the acute period of trauma responses. The investigators in this project have been developing and maintaining such a sample (with prior NSF support) and are able to utilize the preexisting sample for follow-up data collection in the context of the 2018 hurricane season.This project will follow representative samples of over 3,000 residents of Florida, Texas and the New York metropolitan area who were surveyed in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017. It offers an important opportunity to document predictors of variability in response to the 2018 hurricane season, as well as to examine several questions relevant to risk assessment and community response to a natural disaster. Specifically, in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 hurricane season, adjustment processes, risk assessments, disaster preparedness, and behavior change will be examined. Prior research has suffered from serious methodological limitations, including lack of pre-data, retrospective data collection, and small or demographically homogenous samples. The current project avoids these limitations by incorporating prior waves of data collection, using more contemporaneous assessments, and drawing from large and diverse samples. This research will advance future conceptual work on coping with highly stressful events in many ways. It will further our understanding of the extent to which traditional and non-traditional media coverage of hurricanes may play a role in individuals' risk perceptions and stress responses. It will provide information to facilitate early identification of individuals at risk for subsequent difficulties following potential natural disasters. It will identify information critical to communicating to the public during large-scale threats. It will inform intervention efforts to encourage disaster-mitigation behaviors (before, during, and after threats). Finally, it will advance basic knowledge by integrating the research literatures on stress and coping with important bodies of knowledge on decision making.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.