The lived experience of preparing for earthquakes in households: a phenomenological psychological study

Yoshinori Nakagawa ()
Additional contact information
Yoshinori Nakagawa: Kochi University of Technology

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2017, vol. 88, issue 3, No 26, 1825-1844

Abstract: Abstract This phenomenological study aimed to explore the lived experiences of households after the installation of seismic hazard mitigation measures. Unlike studies aimed at identifying the causal mechanisms behind household behavior, the present study focused on the subjective meaning of these experiences. A total of 17 households that had adopted seismic retrofitting were interviewed; data from six of these households were purposefully selected and analyzed in detail using Giorgi’s phenomenological psychological method. The data were reduced to a single structure according to which the installation of the seismic hazard mitigation measure was considered a dilemma related to perceptions of vulnerability versus the awkwardness of getting started, which developed into another irreconcilable dilemma related to feeling safer versus an awareness of absolute safety. In this process, a sense of life coherence was established, which enabled the participants to accept the irreconcilability. On the basis of these findings, this study proposes a new approach of promoting earthquake preparedness, in which the central point is practitioners assisting households to create their own coherent life stories to deal with these dilemmas. It sheds light on the importance of how practitioners listen to households, rather than of how practitioners inform households.

Keywords: Phenomenology; Hazard mitigation measure; Household; Seismic adjustment; Seismic retrofitting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-017-2948-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:88:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11069-017-2948-6

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-017-2948-6

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 ().