The Development and Validation of Disaster Response Personnel Placement Strategies through Competency Analyses of Disaster Responding Personnel: Scale Developments of Disaster Response Competency Profile Indices and Their Validation through Simulation Exp

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This study aimed to identify observable and measurable behavior traits that were shared among highly competent disaster responders and to construct screening instruments that assessed disaster responder competency. Focus group interviews to competent experts in disaster responses were conducted in order to capture statements that typified competent disaster responders. Conceptual clustering of the statements produced three major competency categories and they were found to be associated with three major disaster response functions. Those were namely 1) incident commander competency, 2) management staff competency (Intelligence, Planning, and Logistics), and 3) operation competency. Four experts on each function/competency from the Kobe City Fire Department were interviewed in order to examine content validity of the competency statements/items. These validation interviews formed a basis to construct a preliminary multiple choice instrument to measure disaster response competencies. Two … More other types of instruments were simultaneously constructed, one a free-answer questionnaire, the other a questionnaire that asked respondents to evaluate hypothetical cases on disaster response. Three different instruments measuring three different competencies were administered to fifty disaster responders at Kobe City Fire Department and thirty-three questionnaires were returned. Standard item analysis procedures were conducted and the best items representing each corresponding competency in each instrument were selected. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique was applied to test construct validity of the refined instruments by analyzing multitrait-multimethod (Mnsm) variance-covariance matrix data obtained from the selected items. The analysis results validated the construct validity of the refined instruments. The instrument was thereafter named the first version of Disaster Response Competency Profile Indices (DRCPI). The DRCPI questionnaires were administered to 378 firefighters in Mid-to Western-Japan municipalities. Incident commander DRCPI scores were found to be significantly high among incident commanders compared with operation or staff personnel. Less