Capturing the citizen perspective in crisis management exercises: possibilities and challenges

Abstract

Purpose – Supporting and communicating with citizens is a vital part of societal crisis management. Training exercises may offer an opportunity to develop capabilities among managers in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to examine this potential in an analysis of how citizens were portrayed and perceived by participants in a major crisis management exercise. Design/methodology/approach – Observation, document analysis and short interviews during the exercise were used as data collection methods. Data were subjected to thematic analysis to capture core themes in relation to the research aim. Findings – Patterns in how citizens’ reactions were portrayed in the exercise were identified to form a citizen behaviour typology. Observations during the exercise also demonstrated some of the challenges in incorporating the citizen perspective. However, findings regarding the perception of the citizen perspective also demonstrate the ability of exercise participants to meet and respond to public behaviours with respect and seriousness. Originality/value – Variation is an important condition for learning in exercises, and the identified typology is suggested as a starting point for achieving this in incorporation of the citizen perspective in training scenarios. The results of the study are discussed in terms of a learning framework with the aim of explicitly developing crisis managers’ ability to interact and communicate with citizens in crisis situations.

Using fear appeal theories to understand the effects of location information of patients on citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…To better manage a public health crisis, researchers have separately explored physical distance (Manabe et al, 2012 ), citizens’ anxiety (Wang, Pan, Wan, Tan, Xu, Ho, et al, 2020 ; Sadeghzadeh et al, 2021 ), attention to information (Bento et al, 2020 ) and preventive behaviors (Basch et al, 2020a ). This model provides researchers with new perspectives by which to explain the relationship among physical distance, citizens’ emotions, attention to information and behaviors, which all tend to emphasize the importance of understanding citizens’ reactions in crises (Scott et al, 2015 ).…”

Postpandemic Nightmare: A Framing Analysis of Authorities and Narcolepsy Victims in Swedish Press

“…Here, the potentials of exercises should be explored. Previous research has explored how exercises can be used for training communication with the public and concludes that these have a potential, if constructed in a way that facilitates learning, in preparing crisis managers for this task (Scott, Brandow, Hobbins, Nilsson & Enander, ). Thus, the already existing possibilities in the crisis management system for training crisis communication should be explored.…”

Fieldwork Analysis of Figurants' Involvement in an Airplane Crash Simulation in Order to Improve the Realism of the Exercise

“…For crisis managers, the value of an exercise is determined by its degree of realism [22]. However, some researchers argue that trying to make a realistic exercise may in itself be unrealistic [23].…”

“…To our knowledge, very few studies focus on the point of view of the role-playing teams of figurants. Scott et al [23] argued that "the contribution of a real public can yield positive effects in the form of unpredictable reactions and behaviors that put extra pressure on the participants." In this research, we aim to learn more about taking into account real laymen behavior when designing aircraft crash simulations.…”