National and international media have reported the British Petroleum Horizon Oil Disaster (BPHOD). This project explores the impact of the media accounting on the ways that communities come to understand the event, and identifies intervening factors that mitigate community adoption of the media accounting. The environmental problems literature has long posited that problem identification is a construction process and a critical element of that construction is media accounts. The research team tries to make sense of the impact of the media stories by completing a content analysis of the media accounting and by designing and implementing a survey to measure residents' understanding of the event. The survey includes measures of the respondents' vested economic interests, their stakeholder self-identification, the direct impact of the BPHOD on them, and their understanding of the specifics concerning the BPHOD event. The respondents are selected randomly within six communities spread across coastal Louisiana in order to "intercept" communities with different exposures to the BPHOD. The study tests multiple theoretical models describing the likely outcome of the effect of the media accounting on communities' understanding of the event.
This project provides new knowledge that will help policy makers design effective plans for disaster mitigation and response.
This project examines the ways in which technological disasters come to be defined in the communities that experience them. We identified three theoretical positions: Corrosive Community; Frames; and Association and used community surveys administered one year after the BP oil spill to assess their efficacy as predictors of community response. Corrosive Community: The literature posits that there is a difference between natural and technological disasters. While natural disasters often lead to the emergence of a "therapeutic community" with an outpouring of both official and spontaneous assistance to residents that reduces impacts and enhances recovery, "technological disasters tend to be followed by the emergence of corrosive communities…," often characterized by litigation, charges, and counter charges where the effect is often to blame the victims, to divide the community, and to delay or to prevent the start of recovery. Frames: The framing perspective does not predict intense disagreement, but does posit that conflicting "frames," tied to vested interests, including economic ones, can arise over environmental controversies. These frames can be quite complex and recognizable strategies may be seen such as "diversionary reframing" and "representative anecdotes." Association: The association hypothesis argues that coastal Louisiana (where offshore oil first emerged) has a long-term and pervasive historical relationship with the offshore oil and gas industry. In the same fashion, coastal Louisiana has a long association with commercial fisheries. Thus it is possible that communities, because of their historical relationships rather than a precipitating event, could come to support the interests of either oil or commercial fisheries or both at the same time. We hand delivered mail-back questionnaires in six coastal Louisiana communities four of which were oiled and two of which were not directly affected by the oil spill. We received 278 completed questionnaires. We found no support for the corrosive hypothesis. This is a theoretical perspective that came out of the Exxon Valdez oil spill which was followed for 20 years. Thus, our findings may be due to the fact that the contentious and litigious nature of the potential conflict in communities and families had not had time to manifest itself after one year. We have sixteen questions which measure attitudes toward the oil spill and its effects which we used as dependent variables to test the Framing hypothesis; eight showed that those who work in the fishing industry view the spill more negatively. None showed any difference among oil workers. This lends support to the thesis that framing is occurring among those employed in fisheries but not necessarily those employed in the oil industry. Similarly, in sixteen tests of the Association hypothesis, eight showed that those with family and friends in fishing view the spill more negatively. None showed any difference among oil workers. This leads us to believe that there is moderate support to the idea that association within the fishing community influence respondents' interpretation of the event. Unexpected finding: We had twenty measures of loss (financial, emotional, relationships, health) from two points in time (in the three months after the spill, and again a year later). We found that those with the greatest loss were less likely to report corrosiveness in their community. We interpret this to mean that those experiencing losses turned to their community for support. The P.I.’s of the project have described the findings in applied settings in which they have participated. This includes scientific research advisory committees and in public presentations.
