Preparedness And Disasters: A Very Complex Relationship
Date
1994
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Disaster Research Center
Abstract
Description
Our remarks are organized around the three major words in the
title, namely, preparedness, disasters, and relationships.
As a preface, we should note our comments are not based on the
results of any particular study, but instead are drawn from about
four decades of social science research starting in the late 1950s.
Thus, our knowledge data base includes literally at this point
thousands of studies. Our Center alone, the Disaster Research
Center, has examined in the field more than 515 different disaster
and crisis occasions. Also, while initially the work on disasters
was primarily undertaken in the United States, through the years it
spread around the world so that at the present time there are about
three dozen different societies where there is at least a core of
social science disaster researchers. Thus, the research results we
use are not exclusively rooted in American society. To be sure,
the studies done are somewhat slanted more towards developed than
developing societies and are more focused on sudden rather than
diffuse kinds of disaster situations, but many of the observations
made would appear to be rather generalizable.
Keywords
Preparedness, Disaster, Relationship