<b>Experimental Surveys on Information Provision to Promote Disaster Management Measures</b>

Abstract

Many large-scale natural disasters including earthquake, river floods, and landslides, have affected Japan. Promotion of household disaster prevention is a serious problem. Disaster preparedness at home has not been implemented despite its importance. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of providing information to promote disaster prevention measures. Key research questions are; how promoting improvements contributes to household disaster prevention and how disaster prevention consciousness reflects behavior.The study consists of three experiments. In the first, we tried to verify the change in disaster prevention awareness of university students and the usefulness of the disaster prevention diagnostic test. In the second experiment, we tried to verify the influence on disaster prevention measures behavior using "the information provision strategy" and "the behavioral planning strategy." In the third experiment, we tried to verify the influence of providing information according to TPB (Theory of planned behavior) explaining the disaster prevention behavior.Although the disaster prevention diagnostic test did not contribute to the disaster prevention behavior in the first experiment, it could be seen to act as a trigger to rethink the improvement in disaster awareness and disaster prevention measures. If people were in an environment with tools for disaster prevention, an awareness of disaster prevention, and a level of knowledge had an influence on disaster prevention behavior. In the second experiment, the information provision strategy and the behavioral planning strategy did not contribute to improvement in all aspects of disaster prevention awareness and disaster prevention behavior. However, we were able to promote "simple disaster prevention behaviors", etc. related to the information provision. In the third experiment, the information provided in this survey did not contribute to the promotion of the "attitude toward the behavior", "subjective norms", and "perceived behavioral control", which are the factors of TPB. Based on these results, we examined other factors contributing to disaster prevention behavioral intentions and found that "cost cognition", etc. contribute to disaster prevention behavioral intentions.The significance of this research is that these surveys can clarify effective methods for promoting disaster prevention measures in each home, and can be used as a method improving disaster preparedness in the future.