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Developing a framework to analyze coordination patterns occurring in the emergency response life cycle.

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The increasing number of campus-related emergency incidents, in combination with the requirements imposed by the Clery Act, have prompted college campuses to develop emergency notification systems to inform community members of extreme events that may affect them. Merely deploying emergency notification systems on college campuses, however, does not guarantee that these systems will be effective; student compliance plays a very important role in establishing such effectiveness. Immediate compliance with alerts, as opposed to delayed compliance or noncompliance, is a key factor in improving student safety on campuses. This paper investigates the critical antecedents that motivate students to comply immediately with messages from campus emergency notification systems. Drawing on Etzioni's compliance theory, a model is developed. Using a scenario-based survey method, the model is tested in five types of events-snowstorm, active shooter, building fire, health-related, and robbery-and with more than 800 college students from the Northern region of the United States. The results from this study suggest that subjective norm and information quality trust are, in general, the most important factors that promote immediate compliance. This research contributes to the literature on compliance, emergency notification systems, and emergency response policies.

Emergency response requires an efficient information supply chain for the smooth operations of intra-and interorganizational emergency management processes. However, the breakdown of this information supply chain due to the lack of consistent data standards presents a significant problem. In this paper, we adopt a theory-driven novel approach to develop an XML-based data model that prescribes a comprehensive set of data standards (semantics and internal structures) for emergency management to better address the challenges of information interoperability. Actual documents currently being used in mitigating chemical emergencies from a large number of incidents are used in the analysis stage. The data model development is guided by Activity Theory and is validated through a RFC-like process used in standards development. This paper applies the standards to the real case of a chemical incident scenario. Further, it complies with the national leading initiatives in emergency standards (National Information Exchange Model).The 9/11 commission reports (Kean 2004) as well as analyses of Hurricane Katrina (Townsend 2006) explicate how inadequate emergency response management is a major factor contributing to the lack of an effective response. Among the factors accountable for the observed inadequacy, the response information supply chain (ISC) that connects the response operations and stakeholders has been recognized for its critical role in supporting an effective response during critical incidents (Aylward et al. 2006;DHS et al. 2006;Frale 2005;Harrison et al. 2006; Weinshel 2006). While an efficient ISC demands smooth and seamless interoperability, the reality is that there are no standards that cater to specific types of incidents such as fire or chemical incidents. The efforts of bodies such as the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have focused primarily on standards of a more general nature dealing with emergency management issues (e.g., call alert). These have been top-down impositions of standards. However, incidents of specific types and day-to-day operations are handled mostly at local levels (Chen et al. 2005;Chen et al. 2007a). They are typically governed by local regulations and practices and are managed through collaboration with first and second responder communities from neighboring counties and towns (Bui et al. 2001; Chen et al. 2007b;Kim et al. 2007). Therefore, there is a need to adopt a more comprehensive requirements gathering approach that takes into account the social aspects, contradictions, governance rules, division of labor, etc. This paper adopts a novel approach by adapting Activity Theory to provide a framework to develop emergency data standards. Activity Theory prompts consideration of issues and concerns such as communities and sub-communities and the contradictions that are not part of traditional approaches. We provide a more detailed discussion on the approach and the benefits of this...