An Approach to Disaster Management from Home Economics Based on Consumer Education

坂神淡路大地震的发生推翻了日本将是一个永远安全的社会的神话。以此为契机，唤醒人们对防灾的新意义的认识，重建安全社会，已变得越来越重要。本研究的目的是从家政学和消费者教育的角度，分析为了有效地促进灾害管理活动，需要采取什么样的教育步骤和提供什么样的支持。首先，调查了消费者的防灾意识、防灾活动和防灾教育的现状和问题。很明显，消费者的日常决策和行为方式影响他们在灾难中的决策。我们得出的结论是，未来的灾害管理教育需要提高消费者对灾害的理解以及灾害的经济管理。基于这些结果，我们用基于消费者教育的方法为大学生提供了关于预防灾害的家政课。通过对课程效果的分析，基于消费者教育的方法在灾害管理教育中是有效的。然而，如何具体地教授决策，以及如何通过建立灾害管理专业协会来有效地协助教育者，是消费者教育和灾害管理教育中存在的两个问题。消费者教育和灾害管理教育是互补的领域：利用消费者教育积累的知识和方法，灾害管理教育将更加有效，而消费者教育可以从危机管理中受益。

The Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake occurred disproving the myth that Japan would be an eternally safe society. With this as a turning-point, it has been becoming more important for people to be awakened to the new significance of disaster prevention to recreate a safety society. The purpose of this study are to analyze what kind of educational steps and what kind of support is necessary in order to promote disaster management activities effectively from the viewpoint of home economics and consumer education.First, we surveyed the present state and problems of consumer awareness of disaster prevention, their disaster prevention activities and disaster prevention education. It became clear that consumer's way of every-day decision making and behavior affects their decision making during a calamity. We concluded that the future education of disaster management needs to promote better consumer understanding of disaster as well as its economic management.Based on these results, we gave home economics lessons for university students on prevention of disasters using consumer education-based methods. By the analysis of the effects of the lesson, the methodology based on consumer education seems effective in providing disaster management education. We, however, found it necessary to solve two problems existing in consumer education and disaster management education ; namely how to teach decision making concretely and how to effectively assist the educators by the creation of a professional association of disaster management. Consumer education and disaster management education are complementary fields : taking advantage of the accumulated knowledge and methods of consumer education, disaster management education will be more effective, while consumer education can benefit from crisis management into view.