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COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION
PATTERNS AMONG NEW ORLEANS EVACUEES BEFORE, DURING AND
AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA
Research by Dr. Susanna Priest
College of Mass Communications and Information Studies
Persuading people to evacuate in advance of a
predicted threat, such as a hurricane, has been a
perennial problem that has resulted in the loss of many
lives. Unfortunately, people tend to discount warnings,
especially after repeated exposure to them. University
of South Carolina researchers set out to learn more
about the dynamics of these reactions.
 USC
researchers decided to investigate how much information
– and from what kinds of sources – evacuees had about
Hurricane Katrina before, during and after the storm and
how this information fed into their decisions to stay in
their homes or leave. In particular, USC researchers
focused their efforts on the information that was
received up to the moment a decision was made to
evacuate.
The team interviewed more than 100 Katrina evacuees in
four states (South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, and
Alabama) during the fall of 2005. The team relied on a
network of faculty and graduate-student collaborators to
reach the broadest possible range of interviewees.
Researchers wanted to know whether gaps in knowledge led
some people to delay evacuation and how these gaps might
vary with ethnicity or social class.
Researchers also pursued additional issues, including
the effects of media deprivation, the evaluation of
media performance in this crisis, and the particular
experiences of women and those returning to New Orleans.
Researchers even explored the parallel between elements
of disaster communication during Hurricane Katrina and
those that might arise as the result of a terrorist
attack. The team’s future analysis will look more
closely at post-evacuation information needs and
communication patterns.
Contrary to their expectations, USC researchers did not
find strong evidence of knowledge gaps among different
groups of people, although the level of trust in
authorities was likely to have been a factor and might
vary by social class and ethnicity. All in all,
researchers concluded that both general hurricane
knowledge and awareness of this particular storm were
broadly distributed. Researchers also determined that
knowledge and media warnings alone were often not enough
to persuade people of the seriousness of the situation.
According to USC researchers, general knowledge of
hurricanes and local knowledge of flooding
vulnerability, interpersonal communication (such as
alerts from neighbors, co-workers, or family members),
and information from the media, especially the Category
5 designation, interacted in influencing evacuation
decisions. In fact, for many evacuees, interpersonal
communication and patterns of “opinion leadership” were
crucial to a final decision to leave. Opinion leaders
ranged from family members and neighbors to television
appearances from the local weatherman or the mayor.
Researchers found that in many cases it took a phone
call or a neighbor knocking on the door to get people to
make up their minds to move.
USC researchers were not the first to study the
interaction of media information with preexisting
knowledge and interpersonal communication. Research on
other events has demonstrated that interpersonal
communication is often more powerful than media
messages, which are more easily discounted. This USC
team concluded that media information was generally
interpreted in discussion with other individuals. Social
networks, they found, were therefore crucial to
individual decision making in this context. The USC
research team’s findings were also consistent with
research literature in disaster sociology that argues
that social networks do not easily deteriorate under
this kind of stress. Rather, they remain cohesive and
are an important source of community and family
strength. Despite pervasive media images of looting and
shooting, USC researchers found that most people in New
Orleans were able to rely on such networks for support.
 Researchers
involved in this study are continuing their analysis to
determine what factors best differentiate early and late
evacuators. However, the researchers did walk away with
some personal reflections from the study, which have
broader impacts for society. For example, they
discovered that the trauma associated with the sudden
and total loss of one’s possessions (even in those cases
where no one in the family has been injured or killed)
is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine unless it
has been experienced first-hand.
These researchers are also confident that this project
has produced a new understanding of communication
dynamics in the wake of disaster. The team, over half of
which were women, included one African-American faculty
member, one Asian-American faculty member and one
African-American graduate student. They hope to improve
disaster communication so that response to future
disasters – whether natural or willful in origin – can
be improved. This project helped build the team-based,
quick-response research capacity of USC’s College of
Mass Communications and Information Studies and
strengthened its collaborative relationships with other
institutions.
So far, this USC team has submitted a panel proposal to
the National Communication Association and a manuscript
to the Journal of Applied Communication Research. A
number of other papers are also in progress, including
one on media use before, during, and after the storm, as
well as one on media deprivation. Research leader Dr.
Susanna Priest will participate in a workshop on this
topic at the Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication annual meeting.
Biography
Dr. Susanna Priest is president of the Science
Communication Interest Group of the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the
associate editor of the journal Public Understanding
of Science. She is also an active member of the
editorial board at Science Communication. Dr.
Priest holds a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology, a
Master’s degree in sociology, and a Ph.D. in
Communications. She has published more than 40 scholarly
articles and book chapters, plus two books.
Research Team/Collaborators:
Other USC collaborators included faculty members
Kenneth Campbell, Cheryl Harris, Laura Smith, and Ran
Wei plus graduate students Hilary Fussell and Kim Smith.
Faculty collaborators at other institutions were Stephen
Banning at Louisiana State University and Karen Taylor
at Tulane University. |
