The Influence of Tornado Activity, Impact, Memory, and Sentiment on Tornado Perception Accuracy among College Students

Abstract

A survey consisting of open-ended and closed responses was administered at three universities in the eastern USA. The home counties of survey participants represented climatological tornado risks spanning from rarely impacted to frequently impacted. The first objective of this research was to classify climatological tornado risk for each county so that analyses of tornado perception accuracy could be evaluated. Perception accuracy was defined as the difference between what each participant perceived minus what actually happened. A manual classification scheme was created that uses the Storm Prediction Center’s Convective Outlook framework as county climatological risk categories. Participants from high-risk counties statistically significantly overestimated the numbers of violent tornadoes compared to participants from every risk category but moderate. Furthermore, participants from high-risk counties had significantly greater tornado impacts, thus validating the classification of high-risk. Participants from high, moderate, and slight-risk counties significantly overestimated the number of strong tornadoes compared to participants from enhanced-risk counties. There appeared to be no relationships between tornado memory and tornado sentiment with tornado perception accuracy. Possible explanations for the overestimation of the numbers of violent tornadoes in high-risk counties are discussed.

Dynamic Early-Warning Model of College Students’ Psychological Crisis Based on Characteristic Attribute

“…It is the common pursuit and goal of the government, the university, the society, the family, and even the individual students who meet the psychological crisis to make full use of the pyramid model to prevent and intervene the psychological crisis of college students [33]. Although the pyramid model of psychological crisis of college students can achieve the characteristics of abstraction, prominence, and systematic linkage [34][35][36]; in order to reduce losses, avoid risks, and improve efficiency, it is necessary to carry out advance education and rehearsal of psychological crisis of college students for key groups closely related to psychological crisis.…”

How Close is Close Enough? A Discussion of the Distances Relevant to Personalizing Tornado Risk

“…Other research suggests that individuals were not always able to accurately estimate how close they had been to a tornado. In one study, 18% of participants indicated that they had been within 1 mi of a past tornado; however, comparing the details they provided against tornado records in Storm Data revealed many questionable direct experiences for these participants (Senkbeil et al 2019). While collecting enough data to accurately verify a participant's past tornado exposure was beyond the scope of this project, we did ask participants for their address and the name, distance, and time to travel to the grocery store they shop most often as part of a separate research question.…”