How to increase earthquake and home fire preparedness: the fix-it intervention

Abstract

Published, evaluated community intervention studies concerning natural hazard preparedness are rare. Most lack a rigorous methodology, thereby hampering the development of evidence-based interventions. This paper describes the rationale and methodology of a cross-cultural, longitudinal intervention study on earthquake and home fire preparedness, termed fix-it. The aim is to evaluate whether and how the intervention brings about behaviour change in the targeted communities in two coastal cities with high seismic risk: Seattle, USA and Izmir, Turkey. Participants are adult residents of these cities. The intervention group attends a 6-h workshop, which focuses on securing items in the household. The control group does not attend the workshop. All participants complete baseline and post-intervention, as well as 3-and 12-month follow-up assessments. The primary outcome measure is an observational measure of nine preparedness items for earthquake and fire in participants' homes. This is evaluated alongside participants' self-reports concerning their preparedness levels. Secondary outcomes are changes in levels of self-efficacy, perceived outcome, trust, corruption, empowerment, anxiety and social cohesion. Results from the first of the studies, conducted in Seattle in September 2015, indicate that while the fix-it intervention is effective, in the longer term, multi-hazard preparedness is increased by the mere act of going into people's homes to observe their preparedness levels along with assessing self-reported preparedness and sociopsychological orientation towards natural hazards. This protocol and study aim to augment the empirical literature on natural hazard preparedness, informing 123Nat ) 84:1943-1965 DOI 10.1007/s11069-016-2528 national and international policy on delivery of evidence-based community interventions to promote multi-hazard preparedness in households.

Difficulties in explaining complex issues with maps: evaluating seismic hazard communication – the Swiss case

“…The higher their numeracy skills and the better their rating of the information presented, the higher their haz-ard competence. This is in line with previous findings, highlighting numeracy as an important moderator for the handling of scientific information (Keller, 2011;Peters et al, 2008;Severtson and Myers, 2013) and interpreting graphics (Spiegelhalter et al, 2011). Regarding the effect of the rating, a greater ability to read the maps may have led to a more favorable assessment of the information presented.…”

“…Younger participants and those with third-level qualifications more often correctly state that there are not any areas without seismic hazard in Switzerland. It is known that preparedness increases up to a certain age and then drops again (Joffe et al, 2016). Better-prepared individuals are probably also better informed or more used to interpreting available evidence.…”

“…It is open to speculation whether three sentences already disturb the equilibrium between completeness and comprehensibility (Peters et al, 2007) or whether the caption was just overlooked. A future study using eye tracking could shed light on this, as this method makes it possible to gain a better understanding of the elements taken into account (Keller, 2011). In an eye-tracking analysis of flood maps, it was observed that laypersons have difficulties in focusing on specific aspects of a map.…”

The Fix-it face-to-face intervention increases multihazard household preparedness cross-culturally

“…Each assessment (at baseline, one week, three months and 12 months after the intervention) consisted of a 25-minute self-report survey and observational checklist administered to participants in both intervention and control groups in the two cities in their homes. To access all study materials and measures please see the protocol paper 44 . The checklist, which includes both earthquake and fire preparedness items, was filled out by a member of the recruitment agency as they visually checked to see if each measure had been implemented or not.…”

“…Therefore, pairing earthquakes with the more frequent home fire hazard potentially facilitates adoption of preparedness measures. The full description of the intervention and method appears in a protocol paper 44 ; a summary of the intervention appears below and please see Methods section. The study protocol describes in detail the hypotheses, rationale and methodology of the study.…”