A Functional Systems Approach to Comprehensive Emergency Management

Graduation date: 2016Both researchers and practitioners in fields related to emergency management (EM) use a\ud variety of frameworks for different purposes including analysis, learning, and operations. Despite existing approaches in EM, such as comprehensive emergency management (CEM), the research community has been urged to construct a general normative theory for emergency management (Debrek, 2004).\ud \ud As a result, this thesis describes a functional systems approach to comprehensive emergency management with respect to its relevance and usefulness to the community. The study documented herein proposed a conceptual model as a comprehensive functional emergency management (CFEM) framework. The proposed framework was assessed for realistic representation and usefulness by conducting semi-structured interviews with EM experts.\ud \ud A qualitative, grounded approach to analyze these interviews identified four theoretical concepts related to the proposed CFEM framework with respect to its complexity, use in checklist creation, facilitating communication between different players in EM, and its relationship to other EM frameworks. The thesis concludes with suggested applications and direction to use the CFEM framework in further research and practical deployment