Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: What Motivates Apartment Owners to Invest in Structural Mitigation for Earthquakes? The Relative Roles of Risk Perceptions, Social Influence

本研究记录了加州伯克利的公寓楼业主对其财产潜在地震脆弱性的信念和行为。在这样做的过程中，研究人员利用了观察到的对2005年当地法令的反应的变化，该法令对一种特别危险且具有社会重要性的建筑类型（称为“软层”建筑）的所有者施加了新的要求。将对伯克利软层业主进行大约60次半结构化访谈，其中包括一些在法律出台之前对其建筑进行改造的业主，因此不受法律约束。受试者还将完成一份包含人口统计、个性和风险感知项目的书面问卷。这些定性和心理测量数据将与来自合规记录、工程报告和建筑许可申请的行政信息相结合，以全面探索这些人群如何制定他们对地震安全的决定，并评估实施不同程度结构缓解的多单元住宅业主之间的共同点和区别。本研究的第二个目标是寻找近期法律可能影响业主关于缓解的想法、意图和行为的机制迹象。目的是阐明社会影响如何与目标人群中风险认知和风险调整行为形成和变化中的个体差异相互作用，具体来说，是为了检验这样一种假设，即人格、社会认知、过去的经验和人口特征与缓解意图和行为的关联比风险认知或项目成本效益更大。这项研究的更广泛的影响是它对发展有针对性的、更有效的风险沟通方法、政策设计或激励措施的贡献，以激励类似情况下的建筑物所有者的地震防备行为。

This research documents the beliefs and behavior of apartment building owners in Berkeley, California regarding the potential earthquake vulnerabilities of their properties. In doing so, the researcher capitalizes on observed variation in responses to a 2005 local ordinance that imposed new requirements on owners of a particularly hazardous and socially-important building type known as "soft-story" construction. Approximately 60 semi-structured interviews of Berkeley soft-story owners, including some owners that retrofit their buildings prior to the law and thus were exempt from it, will be conducted. Subjects will also complete a written questionnaire containing demographic, personality, and risk perception items. These qualitative and psychometric data will be combined with administrative information from compliance records, engineering reports, and building permit applications to comprehensively explore how this population frames their decisions about seismic safety and to assess commonalities and distinctions among multi-unit residential property owners who have implemented different degrees of structural mitigation. A second objective of the study is to look for indications of the mechanisms through which the recent law may have influenced owner thoughts, intentions, and behaviors about mitigation. The goal is to illuminate how social influences interact with individual differences in the formation and change of risk perceptions and risk adjustment behaviors in the target population and, specifically, to test the hypothesis that personality, social perceptions, past experiences, and demographic traits will correlate more with mitigation intentions and behavior than either risk perceptions or project cost-effectiveness. The broader impact of the research is its contribution to the development of targeted, more effective risk communication approaches, policy designs, or incentives for motivating earthquake preparedness behaviors among similarly situated building owners.