Bushfire archetypes recognised with research award

Bushfire archetypes research, in-part conducted through the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, has taken out the 2021 Emergency Media and Public Affairs (EMPA) Research Award. Dr Ken Strahan (Strahan Research) and John Gilbert (Country Fire Authority; CFA) led the research on the use of bushfire self-evacuation archetypes research to inform community safety approaches.

The archetypes emerged from Dr Strahan’s PhD research on protective action decision making in bushfires. The archetypes focus on the diverse characteristics of individuals’ behaviours and decisions in a bushfire context. They reflect the different ways people respond during a bushfire and highlight the range of community safety approaches required to ­encourage them to take protective action.

For example, ‘threat deniers’ wait for confirmation that there is no bushfire threat. ‘Responsibility deniers’ and ‘dependent evacuators’ wait for others to take responsibility for them, while ‘community guided’ people interact with other community members before acting. ‘Considered evacuators’ leave immediately but might delay while organising dependents and taking last-minute actions. ‘Experienced independents’ are committed to remaining at home but often evacuate late and ‘worried waverers’ want to be sure that they can’t defend their own before evacuating.

“The evidence-based approach we took reflects behaviour, rather than demographics,” Dr Strahan said. “We’re looking at attitudes and responses to bushfire.”

The Application of self-evacuation archetypes project, managed through the CRC and funded by Safer Together, took Dr Strahan’s self-evacuation archetypes research and investigated the ways in which the research could support community engagement, program evaluation and bushfire evacuation modelling.

Together with John Gilbert, the Program Manager Research and Evaluation at the CFA, Dr Strahan helped embed this evidence into new communication and community engagement approaches at CFA, and across the emergency management sector more broadly, that build awareness and understanding about archetypes. A key element of this phase of the work was the development of archetypes videos to communicate key aspects of the findings to practitioners. CFA engaged Tom Lowe (Polygraph Productions) to produce the videos.

CFA is currently incorporating this research in their practices, including community safety approaches and program evaluation. Presented with the award at the annual EMPA conference in Sydney in June, John spoke about the benefits of working with Ken to enhance the way CFA supports different people based on their behaviours.

“Ken’s research highlights the importance of adapting our approaches to better meet the needs of individuals in communities. Developing practical tools and training to enable this is central to our work,” he said.

“The response has been fantastic. We’re receiving interest now from interstate and internationally.”

EMPA’s Research Award is granted to published research that advances emergency communications by:

• improving community preparedness and/or resilience
• increasing the effectiveness of communication during an emergency
• enabling agencies to better support communities recovering from an adverse event.

You can learn more about Dr Strahan’s research by visiting the CRC’s project page: www.bnhcrc.com.au/research/selfevacuationarchetypes.