Acceptability of Evacuation Instruction Fire Warnings

Abstract

The present research examined a set of fire warning statements that could be used to facilitate evacuation of a multi-story building by manipulating the statements' wording and order. Participants (N = 105) evaluated how acceptable each of 13 statements would be in a fire emergency. Manipulated in the statements were two types of components: (a) 3 levels of egress immediacy: "exit now," "exit immediately," or none, and (b) 3 levels of egress directives: "use stairs," "do not use elevator," or none. Results showed that participants rated statements containing egress-immediacy and egress-directive components higher than statements without those components. There were no significant differences between the two egress immediacy components or between the two egress directives. An additional component order manipulation showed no effects. Implications and suggestions for future research on warning statement composition are discussed.

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“…This method also provides a way to evaluate and compare candidate alarms. Some studies have evaluated the perception of an alarm's acceptability with a single-item rating (Taylor & Wogalter, 2012). Although this may be an indicator of efficacy, an alarm that users perceive to be acceptable may not be effective for a given application.…”