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

本项目将增进对人们在面临龙卷风威胁时所寻求的各种信息的了解，了解他们获得的信息如何影响他们的风险认知，以及他们的风险认知如何影响他们的保护行动。这个项目将对更广泛的社会产生一些积极的影响。实验材料（包括软件）将公开提供给一系列研究人员，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的研究人员，以便其他研究可以增强和扩展这里开发的方法。该项目还包括与专业广播气象学家以及国家气象局、联邦紧急事务管理局、州和地方政府紧急事务管理机构等组织进行广泛的接触，以便告知如何向公众传达与天气有关的风险。该项目将为保护行动决策的研究引入两项重大创新（这里，在龙卷风相关风险的背景下）。首先，与传统的、完全基于调查的研究不同，将使用结合基于计算机的动态决策练习的人在环实验。通过检查参与者与基于计算机的模拟互动的详细日志，将调查替代保护行动（如寻求额外信息、就地避难或疏散）。其次，该项目将克服以往研究的局限，这些研究只关注个人，将个人的决策过程与成对（这里指已婚夫妇）的决策过程进行比较。因此，这项工作有望揭示人际关系如何帮助决定家庭中的保护行动。

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.