Preparedness And Disasters: A Very Complex Relationship

Our remarks are organized around the three major words in the title, namely, preparedness, disasters, and relationships. As a preface, we should note our comments are not based on the results of any particular study, but instead are drawn from about four decades of social science research starting in the late 1950s. Thus, our knowledge data base includes literally at this point thousands of studies. Our Center alone, the Disaster Research Center, has examined in the field more than 515 different disaster and crisis occasions. Also, while initially the work on disasters was primarily undertaken in the United States, through the years it spread around the world so that at the present time there are about three dozen different societies where there is at least a core of social science disaster researchers. Thus, the research results we use are not exclusively rooted in American society. To be sure, the studies done are somewhat slanted more towards developed than developing societies and are more focused on sudden rather than diffuse kinds of disaster situations, but many of the observations made would appear to be rather generalizable