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Community engagement and wildfire preparedness: The influence of community diversity
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posted on 2023-05-22, 13:58 authored by Douglas Paton, Buergelt, PThe need to move from passive forms of risk communication (e.g., distributing information in pamphlets, media advertising) to more active approaches based on community engagement is a theme that permeates several contributions to this volume. Community engagement is used in this chapter to describe a bottom-up process that places responsibility for risk management planning and decision-making in public hands. It is fundamentally concerned with empowering people. As such, it becomes pertinent to consider engagement with regard to how formal risk management agencies interact with communities and their members and with regard to how members of these communities relate to one another. Chapter 14 discusses engagement from the perspective of how agencies interact with communities to facilitate effective information exchange and the development of shared, complementary perceptions of risk, responsibilities, and roles. This chapter discusses engagement from the perspective of intra-community relationships and how the quality of the interaction between community members influences preparedness. In particular, it discusses how the dynamics of interaction between family members and between neighbors who share comparable levels of wildfire risk can either facilitate or inhibit people taking action to prepare for wildfires. The foundation for the work discussed in this chapter was finding that a single variable, critical awareness (which assesses the frequency with people to discuss wildfire issues with others in their community and regularly think about hazard issues), was the strongest predictor not only of whether people decided to prepare, but also of their deciding not to prepare for earthquake hazards (Paton, Smith & Johnston, 2005). Finding a similar outcome in a subsequent study of wildfire preparedness (Paton, Kelly, Biirgelt & Doherty, 2006) prompted asking questions about how discussions about risk (captured by critical awareness) influenced how people made choices about confronting and addressing wildfire risk. To seek answers to this question, symbolic interactionism was selected from the various theoretical frameworks available in social research as the theoretical foundation most appropriate for such an investigation. The next section discusses symbolic interactionism and its implications for studying community engagement and preparedness.
History
Publication title
Wildfire and Community: Facilitating Preparedness and ResilienceEditors
Douglas Paton and Fantina TedimPagination
241-259ISBN
9780398088422Department/School
School of Psychological SciencesPublisher
Charles C Thomas Publisher, LtdPlace of publication
Illinois, USAExtent
17Rights statement
Copyright 2012 Charles C Thomas Publisher, LtdRepository Status
- Restricted