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Children in disasters: the role of household preparedness

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Abstract

To increase children’s resilience to disasters, it is important to expand our understanding of what increases their vulnerability. One household factor that has been tied to disaster resilience in general is the extent to which households have prepared themselves. In the context of wildfire preparedness, the current study examined whether households with very young, young, or teenage children differ in the extent to which they prepare their household compared to childless households. A two-wave survey study amongst Australian residents of wildfire-prone areas (N wave1 = 998, N wave2 = 514) found that households with young (under twelve years old) and very young (under six years old) children had prepared their properties less for wildfires compared to childless households at the start of the wildfire season, but they had caught up in property preparedness by the end of it. However, households with younger children also performed fewer disaster-planning actions than childless households. This difference remained significant throughout the season. The former group also reported lower motivation to prepare, greater perceived difficulty in preparing, and greater lack of time to prepare than childless households. The majority of these findings were explained by the younger age of the adult parents rather than the presence of younger children per se. An exception was that those with young and very young children reported a greater lack of time to prepare than childless adults of a similar age. We discuss practice and public policy implications that follow from this research.

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Notes

  1. In that study, those who endorsed beliefs about preparedness also were more likely to endorse beliefs that revolved around the theme of preparedness as a “way of life”.

  2. Due to the formative nature of the property preparedness and planning items (e.g. completion of each item builds towards greater preparedness, and the items are not expected to be correlated; see Bagozzi, 2011, for a discussion of formative versus reflective measures), Cronbach’s alphas were not calculated for the property preparedness and planning measures.

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Acknowledgements

The research presented in this article was funded by a Grant from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, and the authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Commonwealth of Australia through the Cooperative Research Centre Program.

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Author notes

  1. Ilona M. McNeill and Kevin R. Ronan contributed equally to this manuscript.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Ilona M. McNeill

  2. School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity, Rockhampton, QLD, 4701, Australia

    Kevin R. Ronan

  3. Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, East Melbourne, VIC, 3002, Australia

    Ilona M. McNeill & Kevin R. Ronan

Authors
  1. Ilona M. McNeill
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  2. Kevin R. Ronan
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Correspondence to Ilona M. McNeill.

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McNeill, I.M., Ronan, K.R. Children in disasters: the role of household preparedness. Nat Hazards 89, 1239–1254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-3019-8

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