[Situational Awareness of Public Response for effective crisis management]. / Lagebild Bevölkerungsverhalten für ein effektives Krisenmanagement.

The Coronavirus pandemic, in which public response was and still is central to damage control, has demonstrated how significant psychological and social science insights are for crisis management. Currently, knowledge of public response is often not incorporated into situational reports and, therefore, cannot be sufficiently considered by crisis management teams.With the intent of supporting change, the project "Situational Awareness of Public Response", conducted by the Division of Psychosocial Crisis Management within the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, is currently designing a framework for including public response knowledge in crisis management decision-making. The main focus of this paper is this project. A strategic objective is to integrate public response knowledge more strongly into governmental crisis management. On the basis of evidence-based assessments, the needs and demands of the population can be identified and coping capacities can be better supported by crisis management measures.Several BBK-funded research projects are affiliated to the aforementioned main project, with the objective of strengthening human-centric civil protection. In a test phase, the situational picture of public response was compiled every two weeks on the basis of data and findings from publicly available studies and made available to various stakeholders.

Warning Messages in Crisis Communication: Risk Appraisal and Warning Compliance in Severe Weather, Violent Acts, and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

BACKGROUND: In crisis communication, warning messages are key to informing and galvanizing the public to prevent or mitigate damage. Therefore, this study examines how risk appraisal and individual characteristics influence the intention to comply with behavioral recommendations of a warning message regarding three hazard types: the COVID-19 pandemic, violent acts, and severe weather. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey examined 403 German participants from 18 to 89 years (M = 29.24; 72% female). Participants were allocated to one of three hazard types (COVID-19 pandemic, violent acts, severe weather) and presented with warning messages that were previously issued via an official warning app. Four components of risk appraisal-perceived severity (PS), anticipated negative emotions (AE), anticipatory worry (AW), and risk perception (RP)-were assessed before and after presenting the warning message. Path models were calculated to predict the intention to comply with the warning message, controlling for age, gender, and previous hazard experience. RESULTS: For the COVID-19 pandemic, higher age (ß = 0.18) predicted warning compliance (R 2 = 0.05). AE (ß = 0.20) predicted compliance in the case of violent acts (R 2 = 0.09). For severe weather, PS (ß = 0.28), age (ß = 0.29), and female gender (ß = 0.34) lead to higher compliance (R 2 = 0.27). Changes across risk appraisal components were not consistent, as some facets decreased after the receipt of a warning message. DISCUSSION: Risk appraisal has shown a marginal yet differential influence on warning message compliance in different types of hazards. Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of sociodemographic factors on compliance should be studied more intensively. Moreover, integrating intermediary variables, such as self-efficacy, is necessary.