Disaster Stories Research Articles

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this issue.Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century. By James Howard‐JohnstonDampier's Monkey: The South Sea Voyages of William Dampier. By Adrian Mitchell1835: the Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. By James BoyceThe Protectors: A Journey through Whitefella Past. By Stephen GrayA Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia. By Diane Austin‐BroosJoseph Lyons: The People's Prime Minister. By Anne HendersonAnzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence. By John Connorp. O.W: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler's Reich. By Peter MonteathAustralia's Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth. By Tom O'LincolnEmbodying Migrants: Italians in Postwar Australia. By Francesco RicattiMr Big of Bankstown: The Scandalous Fitzpatrick and Browne Affair. By Andrew MooreLabour and the Politics of Empire. By Neville KirkHalf a Citizen: Life on Welfare in Australia. By John Murphy, Suellen Murray, Jenny Chalmers, Sonia Martin and Greg MarstonMichael Kirby: Paradoxes and Principles. By A.J. BrownA Private Life: Fragments, Memories, Friends. By Michael KirbyA Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster and How It Led to the Settlement of Australia. By Emma ChristopherA People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. By Timothy LarsenGod's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908. By Hilary M. CareyAfter Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920. By Stuart EaglesPast into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850–1950. By Leslie HowsamCaptives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. By Gillian WeissAll the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914. By John W. SteinbergBelarus. The Last European Dictatorship. By Andrew WilsonCivil Society and Democratization in the Arab World: the Dynamics of Activism. By Francesco Cavatorta and Vincent DuracCivil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non‐Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. Edited by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton AshThe Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. By Susie Linfield

Surviving the Storm: Trauma and Recovery in Children's Books about Natural Disasters

This article examines literature for children and young adults that depicts the devastation of natural disasters, particularly the 2005 hurricane Katrina which hit the eastern United States and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Especially for audiences of young children, representations of death and massive destruction can be a controversial enterprise. Focusing on three types of narratives—animal picture books, eye witness accounts, and young adult fiction—this study explores how children's and young adult literature navigates such difficult issues by retelling stories of large-scale disasters as scenarios of trauma and recovery.

Older adults' narratives about a flood disaster: Resilience, coherence, and personal identity

Older adults are a vulnerable group in a disaster and are more at risk of adverse effects as a result. This paper draws on the use of narrative theory in health and gerontology studies to examine how a disruptive disaster was storied. Narrative interviews were conducted with nine older adults aged over 65years who had recently experienced a flood disaster. The participants' narratives about the disruptive event were integrated with past personal events that spanned more than seven decades. The disaster became a reference point for previous challenging experiences, which created biographical continuity, coherence and order over time. Furthermore, the disaster stories were about biography and identity, and showed how older adults made sense of the flood from a life-course perspective. The use of narrative approaches provides an insight into how the flood disaster was experienced, and reveals how four older adults storied their experiences of a significant life challenge.

Electrical Power Failure in the Operating Room

Electrical Power Failure in the Operating Room

I do this for Your Own Good: A Story of Shrieking, Disaster and Recovery

This paper describes the psychotherapy of a patient whose treatment had an effect of overtaxing the emotional capability of the therapist to bear the work. The patient experienced efforts to contain her violent reactions as an annihilation and repetition of the most injurious actions of her caregivers in her childhood . The therapist provided special responses, inspired by the work of Sándor Ferenczi, which were found to help the patient discriminate between her parents and the therapist and begin a healing process.

False economy: a surprising economic history of the world

*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* Why do some countries succeed while others fail? What causes boom or bust? The World Trade Editor of the FT explains how the world really works. 'A thorough examination of economies from the age of empire to the age of the IMF' The Washington Post Why do oil and diamonds lead to economic disaster more often than boom? Why doesn't Africa grow cocaine? Why might believing in God be good for your balance-sheet? Botswana and Sierra Leone are both blessed with abundant diamonds. Why did Botswana became the world's fastest-growing economy while Sierra Leone suffered a decade of brutal civil war? For the past two hundred years Argentina had enjoyed a vista of economic opportunity almost identical to that of the USA but in 2001 Argentina's government bankrupted itself. Why did the USA succeed while Argentina stalled? Time and again, world leaders have failed to learn the lessons of economic history, and their mistakes continue to have surprising and catastrophic consequences. The path to prosperity is rarely obvious and the sources of success are often unexpected. In False Economy, Alan Beattie uses extraordinary stories of economic triumph and disaster to explain how some countries went wrong while others went right, and why it's so difficult to change course once you're on the path to ruin.

An analysis of US government and media disaster frames

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the media's disaster coverage reflects the messages disseminated by state emergency management agencies (SEMAs).Design/methodology/approachSEMAs were selected as the unit of analysis because the 2008 National Response Framework designates SEMAs with primary responsibility for managing disaster planning and coordinating the inter‐governmental response to disasters. Specifically, this study identifies ten disaster frames SEMAs use through a qualitative content analysis of all the media releases distributed by three SEMAs (n=303) during a two‐year time frame. It then evaluates whether the coverage reflects SEMA's frames through a quantitative content analysis of 1,088 newspaper articles.FindingsTaken as a whole, the research indicates that framing allows the media to efficiently tell disaster stories, but the media's disaster frames often are not ideal from the perspective of emergency managers. These frames also are affected by individuals and groups outside of the media as well as cultural and societal values.Originality/valueThe paper can help emergency managers identify which disaster frames are best suited for information subsidies (e.g. media releases) and which frames may be better suited for direct‐to‐the public dissemination (e.g. community meetings and public service announcements).

A Selected Bibliography of Library Disaster Stories: Before, During, and After

SUMMARY This selected bibliography includes international sources detailing disasters in libraries, as well as disaster planning and recovery resources.

International Accident, Disaster Stories Generate Greater Interest among Students

With the long-term decline in newspaper readership, the youth market is becoming critical to the future of newspaper readership and circulation.1 In 2006, just 22 percent of those younger than 30-years-old reported reading the newspaper in print, and the statistics have the industry struggling to understand younger readers and their needs.2This study specifically examines youth interest in international news-an area of increasing prominence in newspapers since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Journalists have been searching for ways to produce international news stories that all of their readers, not just younger audiences, would find interesting.3 Some researchers have found that presenting international news in a way that is personally relevant to readers has a positive effect on reader interest levels.4 Techniques include finding local angles to foreign stories, featuring Americans involved in international events or detailing the effects an international story can have on the United States.5This research builds on a series of studies that have looked at international news interest among a broad readership. However, in order to give journalists more insight into the interests of the youth population they are hoping to attract, this study goes beyond the general audience and specifically targets college students. The research examines what characteristics of international news stories college students find interesting, and how personal relevance may affect their interest levels.HypothesesH1:Students will be more interested in international stories involving the United States or Americans.Stories about U.S. persons or actions in foreign countries make up the bulk of international news coverage in American papers.6 Gatekeepers believe links to the United States in international stories will make the stories more relevant to readers and, therefore, more interesting.7H2:Students will find headlines about ordinary people more interesting than news about governments.Readers tend to identify with ordinary people rather than governments; therefore, international stories featuring ordinary people will carry more personal relevance.8H3:Students will be more interested in stories about events that happen closer to the United States.Geographic proximity to the United States affects personal relevance.9 The closer the story is to the reader's home, the more interested the reader will be in that story.H4:Students who were born abroad, have traveled abroad or have relatives living abroad will be more interested in international news, overall.The more personally relevant the issue, the more likely a person will think about the message and seek out additional information.10MethodA total of 117 undergraduate students enrolled in psychology classes at a large university in the southeastern United States participated in the survey experiment for extra course credit in the spring 2005. The participants came in groups of approximately 15 to a classroom on campus to take what they were told was a survey about news media. Fifty-seven percent of respondents were male, and 43 percent were female.The survey consisted of 24 mock headlines about events that do happen or could happen. Each page of the survey featured just one headline, printed to appear as if it were a real headline torn from a newspaper. Using a 5-point Likert scale, the respondents were asked how likely they would be to read the story based on the headline. Each headline had two characteristics-geographic region and a topic category. Also, six headlines were about United States actions or Americans abroad. Geographic region and American involvement tested for how proximity affects personal relevance and interest.Four topic categories that have been used in previous studies of international news interest were also used in this study: accidents/disasters, politics/government, business/economics and ordinary people/ human interest. …

"A Blessing to People": Dorsey Dixon and His Sacred Mission of Song

A Blessing to People" Dorsey Dixon and His Sacred Mission of Song Patrick Huber I'm trying to serve the Lord in my weak way and trying to be a blessing to people, is what I been trying to do. In fact, I've tried to live right all my life, but, you know, we're not going into the story about my life because I don't want that mentioned. I don't want nothing about my life wrote out, because I had it too rough in life. —Dorsey Dixon, on a ca. 1961 homemade recording Carolina Piedmont singer and songwriter Dorsey Dixon was never supposed to live. At his birth in 1897, in Darlington, South Carolina, he was a puny, oxygen-starved baby weighing only three pounds. "I heard [my parents] tell friends and neighbors many times that I was a blue baby. Which I did not understand," Dixon explained in one of his autobiographical writings. "But I have learned that such babies requared the greatest of care by doctors and nerses. and was right up next to imposible to keep one of them from slipping out from the living. But a great unknown Power kept me. and I made it." Dixon's pious Christian parents interpreted his near-miraculous survival as a sign that God had spared him for what they frequently referred to as "a great purpose." Throughout most of his life, however, gnawing doubts about his success in carrying out his divinely ordained mission tormented him. "I do not know if I have full filled the purpose that mother and father said I was left here for or not," Dixon confessed in a memoir written when he was fifty years old. "But I do know that I have had a real tough time in life." 1 For more than thirty-five years Dixon struggled to earn a living in the textile mills of the Carolina Piedmont, but by calling he was a guitarist, singer, and songwriter who came to believe that his special mission in life was to spread the gospel through music. A devout Free-Will Baptist and regular churchgoer, Dixon transformed accounts of small-town tragedies and national disasters into songs and poems about the wages of sin, the unknown hour of death, and the promise of eternal salvation. "Wreck on the Highway," which WSM's Grand Ole Opry star Roy Acuff turned into a national hit in 1942, remains Dixon's most famous composition, but many of his other songs similarly recount tragic events—millpond drownings, train wrecks, schoolhouse fires, ship sinkings, and other calamities. [End Page 111] Such misfortunes became, in Dixon's hands, moral parables about God's wrath and the self-destructive sins of human pride and godlessness, and, as jeremiads intended to generate spiritual renewal, his songs of tragedy usually concluded with somber warnings to sinners to repent of their wickedness and lead righteous Christian lives in anticipation of heavenly rewards. Perhaps such dreadful incidents resonated with him in part because, as he made clear in his late-life interviews and two unpublished autobiographical writings, hardship and suffering deeply scarred his own life. But Dixon's religious faith and his belief in his "great purpose" sustained him throughout fragile health, bouts with chronic depression, unstable personal relationships, intense pangs of self-doubt, and—despite modest songwriting success—lifelong poverty. In many ways his ongoing financial and health problems seemed only to strengthen his abiding faith. "And friends," he once wrote, "I know that the Great Power of God help[ed] me to win in every battle that I fought to stay in the world." 2 Click for larger view Figure 1 Throughout his musical career, Dorsey Dixon (here) turned stories of tragedy and disaster into religious parables of sin and redemption. Photograph courtesy of Wilson Library's Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Beginning in 1929, Dorsey Dixon composed or arranged more than 130 sacred [End Page...

Television News

Early network television coverage of Hurricane Katrina was a narrative of good versus evil. TV news placed itself in the role of hero fighting the evil that was government ineptitude. This narrative style of reporting is especially fitting to the medium of television, which shapes all stories to fit its parameters, and is common in natural disaster stories, which are, ultimately, stories not about nature but about people.

A diagrammatical template for business market demand estimation

This article describes a template that can help guide managers through a minefield of complex product interactions and demand drivers on the way to producing a realistic demand estimation. It is based on many years of consulting and conducting postmortems to find out what went wrong when demand forecasts have gone awry. A menu of troublesome variables that make up a rogue's gallery of the worst offending causes of estimation error are presented. The premise being, if we are aware of the potential trouble spots in demand estimation, we are likely to avoid some of the more serious problems that plague market projections. A diagrammatical template is presented that shows these troublesome variables and where they enter into the demand evaluation process. Next, the template components are introduced to show how the various product interactions and drivers that affect demand estimation are used and how they impact market projections. Throughout, a list of dos and don'ts are provided along with a sufficient number of real-life disaster stories to reinforce the issues.

Stories of Disaster, Relief Efforts and Hope

Stories of Disaster, Relief Efforts and Hope

Noah and Disaster Planning: The Cultural Significance of the Flood Story

Disasters are both interesting and infrequent. Thus, understanding them usually depends on stories others tell us. Such stories frame our understandings and imaginations. With those stories at hand, we comprehend reality and history on the basis of what everyone knows. At times, however, it is useful to examine what everyone knows.To create a lasting narrative, disaster provides rich raw material to elaborate. ‘Natural’ disasters involve universal, primordial elements – water, fire, the shaking of the earth. Beyond those physical elements, disasters elicit basic human concerns – death, injury, disruption, broken social relationships, and fractured hope. Ultimate values and meanings can be challenged. Continuity and permanence are challenged. Such crises can lead to new explanations and the reworking of old metaphors. The task here is to take a disaster story, the Biblical flood – often referred to as the Deluge – and to examine its origins, its evolution, and its continuing impact within the Western World. More specifically, it will be argued that the flood story has had a continuing determinative influence on how disasters have been imagined in American society, especially in the ways that imagery has influenced emergency planning.

The Queen's ‘Little Trip’: The Royal Visit to Scotland in 1842

When Hugh Miller, the editor of the Edinburgh Witness, surveyed the history of royal 'progresses' in Scotland he discerned a feature that was common to all of them: they were 'peculiarly impressed by the stamp of their time, and linked in most instances with the main events and more striking traits of the national history'.1 Taking his survey back to a time when Scotland was experiencing the 'hideous' sleep of popery, Miller wrote with enthusiastic distaste of James IV's pilgrimage across Scotland, 'bound with a girdle of rope, and with a huge belt of hammered iron pressing uneasily on his loins'; the only sound that could be heard was 'the whip plied in self-inflicted flagellation, or the chaunt of the peniten tial psalm'. Passing on to the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, Miller described her entering Edinburgh as a woman of dangerous beauty: 'Mary the loose, the voluptuous, the unprincipled, alike fitted to enchant a lover or to destroy a husband, the victim of her own unregu lated passions, the canonised martyr of Popery, in no degree less surely the martyr of adultery and murder'. He moved on to describe Charles I and Archbishop Laud visiting Edinburgh in 1633 when their insistence on religious services 'in the English manner' served as a pre liminary to the outbreak of the Civil Wars and a foretaste of the outright popery of James VII in the 1680s.2 Miller's article was no mere exercise in antiquarianism; the event that had induced him to take up the theme of royal progresses was one from his own day the visit to Scotland from 1-15 September 1842 of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister. This visit, which took the royal party by sea to Edinburgh and was fol lowed by an excursion to Perthshire, might, so Miller feared, take its place as a story of disaster alongside the other royal progresses he had described. His fear was not that Victoria would embark on an agony of religious ecstasy by flagellating herself round the Highlands. Nor did he raise the possibility that Albert would be done to death at the command of a voluptuously murderous Queen. The royal visit, Miller argued,

Contrasts in the Coverage of Korea and Japan by US Television Networks

The present article examines the frames utilized in the US television news coverage of Korea and Japan. The research question was how American television news stories frame Korea and Japan. The study performed frame analysis of the videotaped news stories with following topics: International relations with the USA; Economics; Demonstrations and protests; and Disasters. News stories about the two countries' political relations with the USA generally utilized a cooperative frame. However, the Japanese economy was heavily framed as a rival, while Koream economy was generally framed as cooperative. The demonstration and protest stories showed a clear contrast between Korea and Japan. While networks framed demonstrations and protests in Korea in a chaos frame, they framed the majority of stories about demonstrations and protests in Japan in a democracy frame. The frame analysis of disaster stories showed a dominance of a sympathetic frame for both countries.

Unhappy endings: a feminist reappraisal of the women's health movement from the vantage of pregnancy loss

This essay contrasts the rosy birth scenarios of the natural childbirth movement with reproductive disaster stories of members of pregnancy loss support groups and women from toxically assaulted communities in the US who have suffered pregnancy loss. I argue that both biomedical obstetrics and the women's health movement critique of it share a belief in the ability to control reproduction so that there will be a positive outcome. I show that this emphasis on happy endings (whether believed to be the result of medical intervention, or women's natural inborn powers to reproduce) exacerbates the experience of those whose pregnancies do not end happily. I show how the women's health movement's emphasis on the importance of women being in control of their own bodies is related to a broader “culture of meritocracy” which contributes to maternal blame (and self-blame) when pregnancies are not perfect.

A New World Order

At least in one way, I am a little like the late comedian Milton Berle (not in too many ways, though; he probably enjoyed wearing dresses more than I do). Until his death in March 2002 at the age of 93, Milton Berle was always the person newspaper editors turned to for a pithy quote whenever any prominent aging vaudevillian died (the pithy quote when Berle himself died was provided by Bob Hope, who, going on 99, is left as spokesperson for nonagenarian comedians). Whenever a particular kind of insect news hits the headlines, I get a call from some media outlet or other for my reaction. People do not call me for stories about mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Chicago or locust plagues in Afghanistan or other typical insect disaster stories. Rather, I get calls for the “feel-good” insect stories. Needless to say, I do not get called all that often. I get calls for quotes once a year when woollybear caterpillars start to cross the roads in droves and when the first “bees” of spring (which are usually syrphid flies) make an appearance. I also get called whenever any insect-related movie opens in town. Most recently, I went all the way to Chicago for a live television interview about the opening of the new “Spiderman” movie, even after I explained to the production assistant that spiders are not insects. Every now and then, though, I get asked about a real story. This happened not long after the first report appeared of the discovery of the Mantophasmatodea, the first new order of insects to be described in more than 80 years. I first became aware of this story myself when I saw an April 8th post from Carlos Flechtmann on the Entomology Discussion List (entomo-l), containing a link to a National Geographic web site (http:// nationalgeographic.com/news) with the story of the new taxon. Basically, the story, dated March 28, 2002, described the work of Oliver Zompro, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute of Limnology in Plon, Germany, interested in stick insects, or phasmids. Zompro noticed a resemblance between phasmid-like fossil insects found in 40-million-year-old Baltic amber (familiar but puzzling to paleoentomologists because the fossils did not clearly belong to any extant orders) and a phasmid-like insect on a pin in the British Museum collected a half-century ago in Tanzania. Intrigued, he made a concerted effort to determine if this group of peculiar insects was still around. A query to museums in Africa produced a response from Eugene Marais, curator of the National Museum of Namibia, that their collection had a specimen from the Brandberg Mountains. Conservation International, the Max Planck Institute, and the National Museum of Namibia joined forces to mount a 16person multinational expedition to the Brandberg Mountains, which resulted in the capture of over a dozen living specimens. The designation of new order status was evidently merited by the unusual morphology and apparent behavior. Zompro called this insect “the gladiator” in honor of the movie of the same name. Zompro was quoted in the article as describing the insect as a “cross between a stick insect, a mantid, and a grasshopper” but details beyond that were not provided in the article, other than to say that the gladiator displays the very un-phasmidlike behavior of eating other insects. Needless to say, this story piqued my interest, and I immediately forwarded it to Jim Whitfield, the insect systematist whose office is across the hall from mine (I guess I must have assumed that email would be faster than just walking across the hall and knocking on his door). Of the many questions I had, the most important was whether Jim thought this was a legitimate report, given that there was no indication in the National Geographic account of a publication in a refereed journal article about the find. He did a quick web search and confirmed that, according to the Max Planck web site, a publication by Klaus Klass, Oliver Zompro, Niels Kristensen, and Joachim Adis describing a new order named Mantophasmatodea was in fact pending. The article eventually came out in Science, published online on April 18 (www. sciencexpress.org/ 18_April_2002/Page1/10/ 1126/science.1069397) and in print in the May 24, 2002 issue (Klass et al. 2002). Details were readily available in the article. Mantophasma zephyra (aka the gladiator) exhibits a phasmid-like general resemblance to a stick, but, unlike phasmids, it lacks an elongate mesothorax. Unlike the resolutely vegetarian phasmids, the gladiator has an apparent mantis-like taste for insect prey but, Stay away from him! He’ll eat anyth ing! Who ’s the n ew guy?

Book Review Section

Personnel PsychologyVolume 53, Issue 1 p. 195-266 Book Review Section First published: 07 December 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2000.tb00199.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Reviewing Books, Appraising Employees, and Saving Humankind Editorial by Lynn Summers, Book Review Editor Mindy Fried. Taking Time: Parental Leave Policy and Corporate Culture. Allan H. Church and Janine Waclawski. Designing and Using Organizational Surveys. Joe Folkman. Employee Surveys That Make a Difference: Using Customized Feedback Tools to Wansfom Your Organization. Richard Ault, Richard Walton, and Mark Childers. What Works: A Decade of Change at Champion International. Sue Lownds. Fast Track to Change on the Heathrow Express. Robert L. Helmreich and Ashleigh C. Merritt. Culture at Work in Aviation and Medicine: National, Organizational, and Professional Influences. Michael Useem. The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All. Robert J. Sternberg and Joseph A. Horvath (Editors). Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice: Researcher and Practitioner Perspectives. Audrey J. Murrell, Faye J. Crosby, and Robin J. Ely. Mentoring Dilemmas: Developmental Relationships Within Multicultural Organizations. Douglas K. Smith. Make Success Measurable! A Mindbook-Workbook for Setting Goals and Taking Action. Thomas B. Wilson. Rewards That Drive High Performance: Success Stories From Leading Organizations. Daniel R. Ilgen and Elaine D. Pulakos (Editors). The Changing Nature of Performance: Implications for Staffing, Motivation, and Development. Richard A. Swanson and Elwood F. Holton III. Results: How to Assess Performance, Learning, and Perceptions in Organizations. Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson. Organizational MisBe-haviour. Thomas O. Davenport. Human Capital: What It Is and Why People Invest It. Allen I. Kraut and Abraham K. Korman (Editors). Evolving Practices in Human Resource Management: Responses to a Changing World of Work. Paul C. Green. Building Robust Competencies: Linking Human Resource Systems to Organizational Strategies. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. The Character of the Corporation: How Your Company's Culture Can Make or Break Your Business. Kevin MacDonald. Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House, and Phil Sandahl. Co-Active Coaching: New skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life. Jim Fuller and Jeanne Farrington. From framing to Performance Improvement: Navigating the Transition. Fritz Drasgow and Julie B. Olson-Buchanan (Editors). Innovations in Computerized Assessment. Donald P. Schwab. Research Methods for Organizational Behavior. Volume53, Issue1March 2000Pages 195-266 RelatedInformation

The Search for Non-Existent Facts in the Reporting of Disasters

In a brief section in his reporting text called, Building the Disaster Story, William Metz starts with the following advice: One of the first things a reporter does after arriving on the scene is to compile a casualty list that includes the names, ages, addresses (or hometowns) and occupations.1 Metz's advice might be appropriate for an accident, but it does not fit the definition of a disaster. Accidents, like train wrecks and plane crashes, usually occur at one specific location. However, in a disaster, there usually is no specific site. The impact area can extend for blocks or hundreds of miles. In an accident, especially one in a controlled location such as an airport, emergency agencies are heavily involved in initial responses. In a disaster that covers a wide area, it is not emergency personnel but survivors who do most initial response and provide initial transport to hospital; and no one is keeping track of casualty lists. Even when emergency agencies do get involved, especially if there are casualties, they do not keep very good records because there is too much to do.2 3 4 Also, in a disaster some injured don't go for treatment because they feel others are in greater need. No one could possibly assemble a list of casualties much less acquire names, ages, addresses, occupations or hometowns. Over the past few decades, social scientists have learned a lot about disasters. They have learned, for example, that disasters are not simply large accidents but different kinds of events. They have learned that individuals perform well in disasters but organizations have difficulty. They have learned that there are many false beliefs about disasters and that the media are partly responsible for that. A review of journalism textbooks suggests that the authors who deal with disaster coverage often state as fact what social scientists have shown to be inaccurate. Perhaps that explains why myths about disasters are perpetuated in the media. Most likely, the students who used these texts were influenced by the inaccurate representation of disasters when they became reporters. Disaster research There is a lot we know about human and organizational behavior in disasters. Disaster experts know people are reluctant to believe warnings unless they are very specific and come from all possible sources. Disaster victims often put aside their own concerns to help others, panic is not a concern it's easier to cope with stark truth than vague information, and that while looting may be commonplace in riots, it is extremely rare in disasters. Riots occur because communities are divided on issues: Disasters usually pull people together (Quarantelli and Dynes (1972); Quarantelli (1984); (Drabek (1986); Scanlon (1992a); Scanlon (1992b). Logically, these findings make sense. When a tornado, earthquake or hurricane causes widespread destruction, survivors can see what needs to be done. Their family, neighbors, or co-workers need help. Organizations have more trouble responding effectively, because disasters overload or destroy communications and disrupt transportation. They have trouble finding out what happened and difficulty responding when they find out. Even when they know what has happened, they have to make difficult choices because there is too much to do. Most important, accidents and disasters are different kinds of events. Collapsed Buildings, train derailments or air crashes occur at one location and they don't threaten a community or disrupt its ability to respond. Disasters disrupt communities and the systems that make them work. It may be hours, days, weeks, or months before those systems are back in place. For example, in Kobe in 1995, the expressway between Osaka and Kobe collapsed in five places and there were 36 breaks in the 90-kilometer line for the bullet train.5 Many people have false beliefs about disasters. They believe warnings cause panic. They believe victims will be in shock, unable to help themselves let alone others. …