This study takes a social marketing perspective to explore community disaster preparedness by considering (1) appropriate sources of information about disaster severity, (2) the ways that community members process information, and (3) how social marketing programs might improve people's ability to protect themselves against natural disasters. With a foundation in the persuasion knowledge model and a scenario-based approach, the authors apply a latent moderated structural equation model to data collected in southern Spain. Consumers first develop persuasion knowledge about a social marketing campaign by performing a threat appraisal and then engage in information seeking, which drives persuasion coping, before activating protective behavior. Systematic processing attenuates the effect of response barriers on persuasion coping but strengthens the subsequent effects of persuasion coping on protective behavior. Social marketers should encourage consumers to engage with community programs and help revise public policy to enhance communities' capacities to react to seismic disasters. This article also suggests implications related to the uses of social media and the adoption of the European Union's advanced seismic code.
This paper presents a new hybrid energy dissipation device and investigates experimentally its capability to improve the seismic response of an inherently very flexible structural system: a reinforced concrete waffle-flat plate structure. The new device combines in parallel within a single device a low-cost viscoelastic (VE) component and a metallic yielding (MY) component. The device has a gap that prevents deformations on the MY component in the range of displacements caused by wind or low intensity earthquakes, to avoid high-cycle fatigue damage. The MY component is expected to activate under the design or the maximum credible earthquake, providing the main structure with lateral stiffness, and a reliable and large source of energy dissipation capacity. Six new hybrid energy dissipation devices (energy dissipation system) were installed in a scaled two-story portion of a prototype RC waffle-flat plate structure (main structure) designed only for gravity loads, without considering special ductility detailing or capacity design rules for the columns. The VE component of the hybrid energy dissipation devices reduced the translational periods with largest effective modal mass along the horizontal directions X and Y to 60%, and increased the fraction of damping to about 12%. The main structure with the energy dissipation system was subjected to bidirectional shake table tests that represented frequent, design and maximum credible earthquakes. In the tests, the main structure remained basically undamaged under the frequent and the design earthquakes, whereas it suffered minor (reparable) damage under the maximum credible earthquake. The MY component remained undeformed under low intensity earthquakes.
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