RAPID: Responding to the Risk of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma: Choices and Adjustment Over Time

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Community-based traumas are pandemic and recurring, profoundly taxing individual well-being and societal resources. Hurricane Harvey, followed by Hurricane Irma, represent stunning examples of such community-based traumas. Yet surprisingly few studies have considered how cumulative exposure to collective and individual stressors such as these may contribute to patterns of adjustment over time. The effects of community traumas can span physical boundaries as well as temporal boundaries, with widespread media coverage transmitting a trauma's impact far beyond the directly exposed population, and challenging the traditional view of trauma exposure. Designing and implementing research on collective traumas requires overcoming formidable scientific and logistical challenges resulting from the fundamental unpredictability of these events. Previous studies that have examined adjustment to community traumas usually involve recalling events long after they have occurred, making it difficult to disambiguate the effects of trauma on subsequent adjustment. Drawing more solid conclusions about long-term trauma reactions requires having a large sample in which information about pre-event mental and physical health, and baseline assessments of psychological responses have been collected during the acute period of trauma responses. The investigators in this project have been at the forefront in developing and maintaining such a sample (with prior NSF support), and are able to utilize the sample and extend data collection in the context of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. This project presents an unprecedented opportunity to document predictors of variability in response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, as well as to examine several questions relevant to risk assessment and community response to a natural disaster. The unparalleled media attention to these hurricanes, coupled with the preexisting large representative sample on which a great deal of data has been collected prospectively (with prior NSF support), provides the opportunity to examine adjustment processes, risk assessments, disaster preparedness, and behavior change without the methodological limitations that have plagued prior research (e.g., lack of pre-data, retrospective data collection, small or demographically homogeneous samples). The research will advance future conceptual work on coping with highly stressful events by (a) furthering our understanding of the extent to which traditional and non-traditional media coverage of the hurricanes may play a role in individuals' risk perceptions and acute stress responses to it; (b) providing information to facilitate early identification of individuals at risk for subsequent difficulties following potential natural disasters; (c) providing information critical to communicating to the public during large-scale threats; (d) informing intervention efforts to encourage disaster-mitigation behaviors (before, during, and after threats); and (e) explicitly integrating the stress and coping literature with the literature on decision making.