| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Daniel Pilgreen dpilgreen@tamu.edu Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences |
| Faculty Mentor: | Dr. Gerard Kyle |
| Meeting Times: | TBA |
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Team Size:
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3 |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Attending national conferences, network development, academic publications, resume building, continued research opportunities
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Team Needs:
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Strong writing skills, interested in natural hazards and research, familiarity with data management and cleaning is preferred |
| Description | Natural hazards associated with climate change, such as hurricanes and tropical cyclones, are often the most visible and direct display of climate change. The continual growth of intensity and frequency of natural hazards due to climate change has placed disaster risk and preparedness at the forefront of addressing the impacts of climate change. Fostering action and preparedness requires the effective communication of the threats, their severity, causes, and impacts on the environment and society. In some instances, fear has been effectively used to foster preparedness behavior. However, through these communications, the discourse surrounding climate change and natural hazards often emphasizes the mortality of humans. Could the fearful and fatalistic scenarios often employed immediately before a hazard to encourage preparedness actually be leading to a lack of preparedness? This research aims to better understand the role of mortality appeals and community perceptions of preparedness in using fear to facilitate preparedness behavior in the natural hazard context and the effects on individual behavior. This research aims to understand how hazard communication and community perceptions influence individual threat processing and ultimately intent to engage in preparedness behavior. An experimental messaging survey of Texas Gulf Coast residents incorporating natural hazard narratives will be used to manipulate the nature of threat (mortality) and the level of threat (severity). The experiment will use structural equation modeling to examine differences in efficacy and threat appraisal across experimental conditions and levels of perceived community adaptive capacity. This research has the potential to expand the understanding fear-appeal theories by exploring varying nature of threats, namely existential threats, and the role of social attachments in threat processing. In turn, the work could provide a foundation for developing hazard communications that effectively communicates threats reducing the risk posed by natural hazards and climate change |