Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management最新文献

This article provides insights from the 'Lessons from the Field' perspective into crisis training using virtual reality (VR). Conventional crisis simulations often involve costly in-person events, limiting accessibility and effectiveness. VR technology has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome these challenges. This article delves into the application of VR in crisis management training, examining real-world exercise examples, and presenting innovative experimentation. A comprehensive experiment, grounded in real-life exercise scenarios, was conducted to gather feedback from participants. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of VR in replicating crisis training environments, providing an innovative solution to simulate real-world use cases. These results suggest that investing in VR research and development can significantly enhance training opportunities for public safety agencies.

While narrative is regarded as a powerfully persuasive tool in previous crisis communication literature, few empirical studies in crisis misinformation correction have examined the danger of narrative-based misinformation about an organizational crisis and how an organization might correct it via prebunking strategies using narratives. Thus, contextualized in an organizational misinformation crisis, this study examined the informational competition between crisis misinformation narrative and organizational prebunking narrative, as well as identified viable ways of using organizational narrative persuasion as a robust prebunking messaging strategy, via the mediation effects of character connection and perceived information quality, to reduce misinformation discussion on social media and increase publics' social correction intention. An online experiment with 1 (Misinformation: blame narrative) × 4 (Organizational prebunking message: blame narrative vs. victim narrative vs. renewal narrative vs. nonnarrative correction) between-subjects design was conducted with 352 US adults. Key findings include: (1) the narrative strategy included in the prebunking message exhibited limited direct effects on participants' communicative behaviors; (2) identification with the spokesperson had more impact than perceived correction quality on participants' communicative behaviors (i.e., misinformation discussion and social correction); and (3) participants' liking of the spokesperson (not trust) was positively associated with their character identification with the spokesperson. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed in terms of the potential for using a solid persuasive tool -- narrative --to combat misinformation narrative through communicative behaviors, as well as the mechanism behind the competition between misinformation and corrective information.

Delphi studies in disaster medicine lack consensus on expert agreement metrics. This study examined various metrics using a Delphi study on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) preparedness in the Middle East and North Africa region. Forty international disaster medicine experts evaluated 133 items across ten CBRN Preparedness Assessment Tool themes using a 5-point Likert scale. Agreement was measured using Kendall's W, Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, and Cohen's Kappa. Statistical and machine learning techniques compared metric performance. The overall agreement mean score was 4.91 ± 0.71, with 89.21% average agreement. Kappa emerged as the most sensitive metric in statistical and machine learning analyses, with a feature importance score of 168.32. The Kappa coefficient showed variations across CBRN PAT themes, including medical protocols, logistics, and infrastructure. The integrated statistical and machine learning approach provides a promising method for understanding expert consensus in disaster preparedness, with potential for future refinement by incorporating additional contextual factors.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, infodemiological studies have utilized Google Trends (GT) data to monitor and predict changes in public interest and social behavior. However, the question posed by researchers regarding the relation between online search interest and public media coverage has remained mostly unanswered. Moreover, many studies focus their research mainly on disease labels and symptoms. Thus, this article aims to contribute to crisis research, providing a long-term analysis of Google search queries and media coverage in Germany between January 2020 and December 2022, incorporating a broad range of different keywords and categories. The study identified strong correlations between GT and public media data for the categories of disease labels, dynamics, and severity, followed by moderate to strong correlations for characteristics. GT analysis of these keywords may be suitable to monitor public awareness, validate the media impact and assess the efficacy of health communication strategies. Since the results for symptoms showed no significant relation, disease symptoms may serve as valuable keywords for surveilling or forecasting the spread of infectious diseases. The study emphasizes the significance of examining the relationship between media coverage and information-seeking behavior during pandemics and other crises.

In response to the societal crisis of trust widely documented by researchers and pollsters, this conceptual paper proposes a Trust Erosion Framework (TEF). By drawing analogies with the process of soil erosion, we postulate that the erosion of trust proceeds in stages: detachment, transportation and deposition. Furthermore, erosion of trust may be precipitated by the gravitational pulls of sticky and spillover crises, moderate weather events (e.g., disinformation), or extreme weather events (e.g., global crises). Responses to trust erosion and further management of trust is a dynamic, cyclical process. We illustrate the key ideas within our framework through a case study of the World Health Organization's crisis communication management during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these ways, the TEF offers an organised, evidence-based way to understand and respond to trust erosion especially during major global crises. The expanded conceptualisation of trust erosion may enable crisis communication stakeholders from academia, practice and policy to develop innovative, proactive communication strategies, that anticipate headwinds and respond in a timely, effective manner.

Khardani, C., and Schmude, J. 2024. “A Micro-Level Model for Crisis Management in Tourism Destinations: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 32, no. 3: e12619. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12619

The research focus for all three should be “Organisational” and not “Tourism.”

I apologize for this error.

The years 2020 and 2021 mark the two largest wildfire seasons in recorded California state history and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article employs the resilience as meta-capability framework in the study of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) response to and recovery from these compound events in the Sierra Nevada region of California, with three aims. The first is to advance understanding of organisational resilience to compound events. The second is to motivate a theoretically informed body of work that moves SME climate-related impact studies beyond empirical description of outcomes and towards understanding of how resilient organisations might be built. The third is to support increased SME resilience through the identification and dissemination of the key capabilities and conditions that enabled response and recovery. Findings, based on semi-structured interviews with 32 Sierra Nevada SMEs, suggest that the resilience as meta-capability framework is helpful towards achieving those ends.