Why Preparedness is So Elusive

Inside My Canoehead

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There are many publications claiming to understand why people choose not to become prepared, in order to provide guidance on the necessary amendments to influence campaigns, to improve the adoption of preparedness behavoirs by the general population. These are notable and important efforts, many of which are grounded in advancing certain models. This presents a difficulty for researchers, first because there is an assumption that the current model of what a prepared individual is accurate. By assuming that the model is correct and that it is the population that is choosing not to adopt through some influential variable, many of the studies fail to consider that it might be the message, that the population does not agree that those ideas will lead to preparedness. Further, it is possible that the population doesn't consider preparedness to be important enough to consider behavioural adaptation.
On the surface, there are three distinct reasons for preparedness remaining elusive. First, is that we do not understand what preparedness looks like. Throughout our examination of behavoirs, communications, programatic interventions and policy formulation, we have not come to a reasonable agreement as to what it is that we are advising the population to become. While I have an evidence-based idea, many others do so as well, what we lack is the forum to debate and challenge the framing of preparedness. In science, it is important to understand what it is that we're studying before we experiment. Second, is the limited frame currently placed on preparedness, that of a disaster or emergency situation. We communicate the phenomenon as something correlated to crisis and chaos, but not consider a whole of life approach. The issue is that when ideas are framed in bad outcome events, there is a lower probability that the population will consider participation or behavioural adaptation. The field needs to consider that preparedness might be something different than only related to disasters, but a culture, a worldview grounded in responsibility. If we can find the forum to debate a broader view, there might be light to illuminate a way forward. Third is the methodology to engage the population. This extends outside the emergency management discipline, to literature on human behaviour, organizational thought and the related fields of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Those fields have decades if not centuries of literature on the reasons why humans first listen to a voice, consider the information offered and to subsequently change behaviour.

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