Published works

Current Australian emergency warning messages that have been refined to match evidence-based practice strongly encourage community members’ readiness to act on emergency instructions (Greer, Dootson, Miller & Tippett, 2019). Given the written elements of warning messages are optimised to encourage readiness to act, this research examines the effect of adding icons and/or colours to official warnings. In this research, we draw on a socio- psychological model of precautionary adaption (Grothmann & Reusswig, 2006) underpinned by Protective Motivation Theory (PMT; Rogers, 1975, 1983; Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1997) to investigate whether emergency warning messages can be further optimised by adding colours and/or icons to encourage even higher levels of readiness to act on emergency instructions.

In order to achieve the aims of this research, an online survey was conducted in which participants were exposed to one of 16 mock emergency warnings about either a bushfire or a riverine flood and were then asked a series of questions relating to their demographic characteristics, message comprehension and effectiveness, threat appraisal, coping appraisal, protection motivation and maladaptive coping behaviour. Mock emergency warnings were developed using existing end-user emergency warnings to improve realism and maximise the usefulness of the findings, as well as building on previous QUT-conducted BNHCRC research (see Greer et al., 2019). A total of 2,482 Australians living across all states and territories were recruited to participate in the research. Participants were recruited by the Market Research firm Dynata. Approximately 150 participants responded to each of the 16 stimuli.

Overall, the research results show that adding colours and/or icons to the Evacuate Now (Bushfire) message creates improvements, albeit small ones, in message comprehension, effectiveness, perceived probability and perceived self-efficacy. The other three messages showed no improvement (or loss) in message comprehension, effectiveness, threat appraisal, or coping appraisal as a result of adding colours and/or icons.