Why are flood and landslide victims less willing to take mitigation measures than the public?

Shuyeu Lin (), Daigee Shaw () and Ming-Chou Ho

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2008, vol. 44, issue 2, 305-314

Abstract: Almost annually, natural hazards such as floods and landslides cause a great deal of financial loss and human suffering in Taiwan. In order to gain a better understanding of disaster preparedness, this paper examines several factors in relation to hazard mitigation behavior: social economic status (education, income), psychological vulnerability (sense of powerless and helpless), risk perception (perceived impact and control) and social trust. The statistical analysis reported here is based on the “2004 National Risk Perception Survey of Floods and Landslides in Taiwan”. The main findings include: (1) in comparison with general public, victims are less willing to adopt risk mitigation measures than the public, even though they perceive larger impacts, worry more about the hazard, and pay more attention to hazard information; (2) trust, risk perception and social economic status are positive predictors for mitigation intentions, whereas psychological vulnerability is a negative predictor; and (3) psychological variables are stronger predictors for mitigation intentions than that of socio-economic variables. In light of these findings, the policy implications and intervention strategy are also discussed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2008

Keywords: Flood; Landslide; Risk Perception; Powerless; Vulnerability; Hazard Mitigation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-007-9136-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:44:y:2008:i:2:p:305-314

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-007-9136-z

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().