Collective efficacy and natural hazards: differing roles of social cohesion and task-specific efficacy in shaping risk and coping beliefs

Abstract

Previous research in non-disaster contexts has shown that the concept of collective efficacy, which is a group's sense of its ability to achieve a specific objective, assists understanding of community readiness and households' decisions to take preparedness actions. Collective efficacy expands the concept of social capital, which refers to social resources such as trust, norms and networks, by addressing how likely communities are to activate these resources for specific tasks. This paper empirically investigates the effect of three distinct collective efficacy components on risk perception, fear and self-efficacy regarding natural hazards in Austria. The three components have differing impacts on risk and coping beliefs: (1) Social cohesion decreases risk perception and fear but has no effect on self-efficacy; (2) Efficacy belief in social support increases self-efficacy; (3) Efficacy belief in citizen groups increases risk perception and fear. The combination of efficacy belief in social support and citizen groups seems to be most promising for stimulating protective action, as they together promote both risk and coping appraisal. However, overreliance on social support may have the undesirable effect of creating a false sense of safety among disaster-prone households. The findings demonstrate that collective efficacy provides a meaningful perspective from which to examine risk and coping beliefs but caution against treating it as an umbrella concept, given the differing effects of its components. Future studies are needed to investigate the impact of collective efficacy on other key explanatory factors of protective action, such as response efficacy or non-protective responses.

Place Attachment and Household Disaster Preparedness: Examining the Mediation Role of Self-Efficacy

“…Although some studies indicated that self-efficacy exerted more influence on planning for preparedness than actual preparedness behaviors [ 64 ], this analysis followed the same observations from Mumbai, Taiwan, and Australia [ 29 , 34 , 65 ]. Besides, we are aware that scholars have proposed several types of efficacies recently, such as the collective efficacy (how community or government can handle the potential disasters effectively) [ 31 , 32 ] or the responsive/outcome efficacy (how effective the actions adopted in disaster risk reduction are in reducing the impact from potential disasters) [ 28 , 29 , 30 ]. This paper contributes to our understanding that self-efficacy can directly promote disaster preparedness and play a mediation role between other variables, such as place attachment in this study and the disaster preparedness behaviors.…”

“…Secondly, this analysis only employed data from a province with relatively fewer occurrences of disasters in China, and thus the overall generalization of this study might be needed. Thirdly, we only included limited dimensions of place attachment and efficacy measures in this analysis; studies including other dimensions of place attachment or types of efficacies such as the collective efficacy and response efficacy [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ] are needed.…”

“…The response efficacy [ 28 ], also termed as outcome efficacy [ 29 , 30 ], refers to the belief or perception of the usefulness or effectiveness of the protective activities or the adaptative behaviors. Similarly, collective efficacy refers to the belief or perception of a group’s conjoint capabilities to organize or do something [ 31 , 32 ]. In the field of disaster research, self-efficacy refers to the assessment of one’s own ability to initiate or complete a preventive, protective, or adaptive behavior [ 29 ].…”

Importance of Self-Help and Mutual Assistance Among Migrants During Natural Disasters

“…According to a recent study by Babcicky and Seebauer [18], collective efficacy or a group's shared belief in its joint capabilities to achieve an objective, influences risk perception, anxiety, and self-efficacy towards protective action. These studies [17], [18] indicate a complex interrelatedness between the beliefs that buttress self-efficacy and collective efficacy.…”

Coaching for a Sustainability Transition: Empowering Student-Led Sustainability Initiatives by Developing Skills, Group Identification, and Efficacy Beliefs

“…In literature on collective action, efficacy is oftentimes associated with and predicted by group identification (Drury and Reicher, 2005 , 2009 ; Van Zomeren et al, 2008 ; Blackwood and Louis, 2012 ; Greenaway et al, 2015 ; Vestergren et al, 2016 ). Likewise, social support was frequently mentioned in qualitative interviews as a prerequisite for collective efficacy (Drury and Reicher, 1999 ; see also Babcicky and Seebauer, 2020 ). Other authors have underlined the following group cohesion characteristics as possible efficacy predictors: appreciation and encouragement from others (Drury and Reicher, 1999 ; Almers, 2013 ), reciprocity (Lubell et al, 2007 ; Collins et al, 2014 ), trust (Collins et al, 2014 ), and social norms (Van Zomeren et al, 2004 ; Doherty and Webler, 2016 ; Wang and Lin, 2017 ).…”