| dc.description.abstract | Although evacuation has been recognized as an effective protective action in responding to a hurricane emergency, it is still not clear why some people leave but others do not. In order to better understand this issue, this study began with a statistical meta-analysis (SMA), which is a procedure that has never been conducted previously in the field of disaster studies. The SMA indicates that homeownership, official warning, risk area, seeing peers evacuating, expected hydrological impacts, and expected wind impacts have strong and consistent effects on evacuation decisions whereas female gender, black ethnicity, presence of children in the home, reliance on news media for storm information, reliance on peers for storm information, and hurricane intensity have weaker effects that
might be due to mediation through psychological variables. Next, this study collected data from the Hurricane Katrina and Rita evacuations and extended the results of the SMA by testing the Huang et al. (2012) abbreviated protective action decision model (PADM). The results show that (1) a household’s evacuation decision, as predicted, is determined most directly by expected wind impacts and expected evacuation impediments. In turn, expected wind impacts and expected hydrological impacts are primarily determined by expected storm threat and expected rapid onset. Finally, expected storm threat, expected rapid onset, and expected evacuation impediments are determined by households’ personal characteristics, their reception of hurricane information, and their observations of social and environmental cues. (2) Surprisingly, expected hydrological impacts did not have as much of an impact on evacuation decisions as wind impacts—which are associated with expected injuries, job disruption, and service disruption. (3) Official warnings and risk area also had direct effects on households’ evacuation decisions, which can be explained as the peripheral route to persuasion that bypasses messages about the personal impacts hurricane impact (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). (4) Unlike other hurricane evacuation studies, this one found that expected rapid onset had a significant effect on households’ evacuation decisions, perhaps because both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had late-changing tracks that might have caused residents to be concerned being caught on the road by a rapidly approaching storm. (5) Supplemental information, such as environmental cues, risk area, and hurricane experience, have effects on individuals’ expectations of storm threat, wind impacts, and hydrological impacts that are similar to those of National Weather Service information that is disseminated through multiple information channels (e.g., news media and official warnings). This implies that households used other sources to place the National Weather Service’s hurricane information into an appropriate context. Nonetheless, some of the results conflict with the model presented by Huang et al. (2012), so further research is needed to determine whether the conflicting results can be replicated and, consequently, require revision of the model. | en |
