Eight Personal Characteristics Associated with the Power to Live with Disasters as Indicated by Survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster

Abstract

People perceive, judge, and behave differently in disasters and in a wide range of other difficult situations depending on their personal characteristics. The power to live, as captured by characteristics that are advantageous for survival in such situations, has thus far been modeled in arbitrary ways. Conceptualizing such characteristics in more objective ways may be helpful for systematic preparations for future disasters and life difficulties. Here, we attempted to identify the major factors of the power to live by summarizing the opinions of survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster. We conducted personal interviews with 78 survivors about their survival experiences and elicited their opinions about the power to live as relevant to those experiences. We then incorporated these opinions into a questionnaire that was completed by 1400 survivors. Factor analysis identified eight factors related to the power to live: leadership, problem solving, altruism, stubbornness, etiquette, emotional regulation, self-transcendence, and active well-being. All factors had sufficient internal construct validity, and six of them showed significant associations with one or more measures of survival success in the disaster, including immediate tsunami evacuation, problem solving in refugee situations, recovery during reconstruction, physical health, and mental health. Overall, the personal characteristics described by the eight factors largely overlap with those described in previous arbitrary models. Further research should investigate the domains, phases, and contexts in which each factor contributes to survival, address whether the factors are rooted in nature or in nurture, and explore their psychological or physiological bases.

A Concise Psychometric Tool to Measure Personal Characteristics for Surviving Natural Disasters: Development of a 16-Item Power to Live Questionnaire

“…To shorten the instrument substantially, we included only two questions for each factor; 16 questions were thus extracted such that the eight trait scores were as well-correlated with the original factor scores as possible. We confirmed the validity of the short-form instrument using the same survival indices as applied in our previous study [17]. Second, we aimed to determine the representability and reliability (internal consistency) of the short-form questionnaire data using another dataset from the general population.…”

“…We utilized data from two populations. First dataset was a part of the data collected in a postal survey of survivors of the 2011 Japan earthquake (reported in our previous study [17]). Second dataset was novel responses collected from normative population in 2015 through an internet survey.…”

“…We recently developed the Power to Live with Disasters questionnaire [17] to address this need. This 34-item questionnaire is based on interview and postal survey data of survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.…”

“…Normative distributions of the scores should be determined so that respondents can judge their characteristics relative to others; it would also be useful to test whether scores vary between disaster survivors and normal respondents. As our previous study [17] targeted only the survivors of the 2011 earthquake, the sampling was inevitably biased towards those who successfully navigated the disaster and its aftermath. If the questionnaire does indeed measure survival-related personality characteristics, we can reasonably expect survivors to score more highly than the general population.…”

“…Assuming that the eight factors identified are truly representative of survival-related personality characteristics, we expected the scores of the survivor group to be higher than those of the respondents from the general population; differences between the two groups were analyzed while controlling for the effects of age and sex. Finally, we examined the discriminant validity of the two forms of the Power to Live questionnaire by utilising a widely accepted questionnaire considering the Big Five personality factors [17].…”