Household Disaster Preparedness Scale

A household disaster preparedness scale measures the extent to which households have adopted actions that reduce their vulnerability to hazards — what the disaster literature calls hazard adjustments. Grounded in Michael Lindell and David Whitney's work on the correlates of seismic hazard adjustment adoption and connected to the broader Protective Action Decision Model, the scale assembles a set of concrete preparedness items — structural measures, survival supplies, and planning actions — and scores how many a household has taken. Beyond producing a preparedness index, the method models what predicts adoption, and a central, robust finding is that households' perceptions of the attributes of each adjustment (its efficacy, cost, time, and difficulty) predict adoption more strongly than fear or risk perception alone. The scale thus serves both to quantify preparedness and to explain why some households prepare while others do not.