RAPID: Responding to the Risks of the 2018 Hurricane Season: Choices and Adjustment Over Time

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Hurricanes threaten the United States every year. Yet the 2017 and 2018 hurricane seasons were especially devastating. Different parts of the U.S. were threatened by unprecedented back-to-back Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017. Hurricanes Florence and Michael made landfall on the east coast of the U.S. within weeks of one another in 2018. In all, millions of residents were directly affected by these storms and millions more were indirectly exposed through extensive media coverage. These hurricanes represent stunning examples of repeated community-based traumas, but surprisingly few studies have considered how the cumulative exposure to collective and individual stressors such as these may contribute to patterns of adjustment over time. The effects of community traumas can also span physical boundaries as well as temporal ones, 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 significant 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 understand the effects of trauma on subsequent adjustment. Drawing more solid conclusions about long-term trauma reactions requires having a large sample on which information about mental and physical health prior to the event is available, along with baseline assessments of psychological responses collected during the acute period of trauma responses. The investigators in this project have been developing and maintaining such a sample (with prior NSF support) and are able to utilize the preexisting sample for follow-up data collection in the context of the 2018 hurricane season. This project will follow representative samples of over 3,000 residents of Florida, Texas and the New York metropolitan area who were surveyed in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017. It offers an important opportunity to document predictors of variability in response to the 2018 hurricane season, as well as to examine several questions relevant to risk assessment and community response to a natural disaster. Specifically, in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 hurricane season, adjustment processes, risk assessments, disaster preparedness, and behavior change will be examined. Prior research has suffered from serious methodological limitations, including lack of pre-data, retrospective data collection, and small or demographically homogenous samples. The current project avoids these limitations by incorporating prior waves of data collection, using more contemporaneous assessments, and drawing from large and diverse samples. This research will advance future conceptual work on coping with highly stressful events in many ways. It will further our understanding of the extent to which traditional and non-traditional media coverage of hurricanes may play a role in individuals' risk perceptions and stress responses. It will provide information to facilitate early identification of individuals at risk for subsequent difficulties following potential natural disasters. It will identify information critical to communicating to the public during large-scale threats. It will inform intervention efforts to encourage disaster-mitigation behaviors (before, during, and after threats). Finally, it will advance basic knowledge by integrating the research literatures on stress and coping with important bodies of knowledge on decision making. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.