The Role of Public Trust and Participation in Effective Risk Communication : A Case Study of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Counties

Risk communication is essential for the public to understand and assess the strength of a risk and to take preparatory actions to mitigate its impacts. Although a variety of alerting devices/platforms (e.g., sirens, radios, and Wireless Alerting Messages via cell phones) are used to disseminate risk information and alerts, at-risk populations’ behavior and responses are influenced by accurate and timely communication of risk, their socioeconomic characteristics, and trust in communication medium (aka warning devices/platforms) and source of information. Through a series of surveys conducted in 2013 and 2014 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, this study examined the following questions: (i) How does local resident trust in warning devices and their use vary according to the residents’ socioeconomic characteristics? (ii) To what extent does public use of and trust in these devices influence response (i.e., decisions to evacuate)? and (iii) How does public participation in communication influence response? Results highlight that: (i) Mississippi Gulf Coast residents trust and use the information received from traditional media (TV, radio, siren, Wireless Emergency Alerts) and family/friends; (ii) younger adults place more trust in social media; (iii) education and income negatively influence public decisions to evacuate (i.e., lower income households tend to respond positively to evacuation orders); (iv) public participation in message dissemination is effective in motivating positive behavior (i.e., evacuation); and (v) households with higher levels of education and income (>$50,000) are not inclined to participate in message dissemination and their responses tend to not be influenced by alerts and warnings