Effectiveness of Community Participation in Earthquake Preparedness: A Community-Based Participatory Intervention Study of Tehran

Abstract

A participatory intervention effectively improved disaster preparedness at a community level. To ensure sustainability, the participatory approach should be integrated into public health disaster planning.

Associating Factors With Public Preparedness Behavior Against Earthquake: A Review of Iranian Research Literature

“…Age was mentioned in 7 articles (in one not as a significant factor [13]; in the others, it had direct [4,6,16,22] and/or indirect [10,19] effect on preparedness. This work indicated that younger people were inclined to be more aware and prepared [21]. Job position [4,11,16,19], income level and socioeconomic status [7,10,11,20], education [4,7,10,13,16,18,19,21] were identified as having both direct and indirect positive impacts on preparedness knowledge and behavior.…”

“…They have tried to identify both the barriers to earthquake preparedness and its facilitators. Most studies identified insufficient disaster preparedness of communities and households all over the country [4,7,10,11,13,15,[20][21][22].…”

“…However, public awareness regarding earthquake mitigation was commonly reported to be infrequent [4,15,[18][19][20][21][22][23]. Five studies noted the positive effect of public education in improving knowledge and practice 15,18,[21][22][23] while two others demonstrated that preparedness would not often be improved only by providing related education and information for people [10,20].…”

“…Some results emphasized on the effectiveness of community-based activities on public awareness, attitude and actions of preparedness [7,21,22]. Communities rarely collaborated with their local authorities related to mitigation and preparation.…”

“…Job position [4,11,16,19], income level and socioeconomic status [7,10,11,20], education [4,7,10,13,16,18,19,21] were identified as having both direct and indirect positive impacts on preparedness knowledge and behavior. Gender [6,16], marriage status [4], and having previous experience of earthquake [19] were also indicated as having a significant positive influence on increasing awareness and readiness in some studies, whereas other studies reported them to be insignificant [11,13,19,21]. Home ownership [11,19] and family size [11,13] were not found to influence public preparedness.…”