This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement project investigates the attitudes and beliefs held by mobile home residents about taking shelter from tornadoes. Mobile home residents are disproportionately affected by tornadoes. They make up about 6% of the population of the United States, but account for about 45% of tornado deaths. Previous studies investigated what people knew about tornadoes or how they perceived danger from tornadoes. This project takes a different approach and focuses on what people know about sheltering strategies and how they perceive the effectiveness of those actions in preventing harm. For example, people who believe they are not able to carry out sufficient actions to protect themselves from a tornado may develop negative attitudes toward sheltering behavior. Such negative attitudes can lead them to ignore warnings and put themselves at greater risk from tornadoes. The first goal of this project is to identify a few common sets of attitudes and beliefs about tornado sheltering within mobile home communities. This will be accomplished by a series of interviews with mobile home residents in South Carolina, where mobile homes are as prominent in the housing sector as any other state in the United States. After the interviews, a questionnaire will be mailed to random occupied mobile home units in South Carolina; this will provide data for the remaining goals of the project. A second goal is to discover if certain types of attitudes and beliefs are more prevalent in different sectors of the population. For example, the study will investigate gender, age, race and ethnicity, family structure, education, mobility, and several other factors to determine how these relate to attitudes and beliefs about taking shelter from tornadoes. This project will also research whether mobile home residents living in different geographic situations have different tornado sheltering strategies. Many mobile homes are situated in and near urban areas within mobile home parks containing dozens of units. However, there are also large numbers of mobile homes in rural areas which are single-sited units situated in areas with fewer roads and nearby sturdy structures. The final goal of this project is to find out what mobile home residents intend to do when tornadoes threaten, and to understand which factors discussed above are most important in their decisions as to what to do. This will enable the building of a conceptual framework for how mobile home residents develop tornado sheltering plans and take action, or why they fail to do so.
This project benefits society by fostering awareness and education to reduce the number of deaths and injuries in mobile homes as a result of tornadoes. The interview and questionnaire data will be made available to researchers and practitioners interested in the issue of tornado sheltering. Results of the study will be presented at national meetings attended by meteorologists from the National Weather Service, emergency managers from federal, state, and local agencies, and other researchers. The findings will inform new education and outreach programs, as well as aid in improving communication between the public and those in the emergency management and meteorology sectors. The methodologies used in this study will provide an example for future work to investigate mobile home resident tornado sheltering in other regions of the United States. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this study also provides support enabling a promising student to establish a career as an independent researcher.
