I've done two projects funded through the Quick Response program. I'll briefly describe them, the influence they've had on my research, and some concerns I have about the Human Subjects review that is now necessary for applications. Quick Response Research and Scholarship in Geography
A panel organized and chaired by Sarah Michaels
Sponsored by the:
Hazards Specialty Group (SG),
Qualitative Methods SG, and
Environmental Perception and Behavior SG
Held at the annual national meeting of the:
Association of American Geographers
Philadelphia, 16 March 2004Panelists in order of presentation:
Christine M. Rodrigue, CSU, Long Beach
Sarah Jean Halvorson, University of Montana
James K. Mitchell, Rutgers University
Susan L. Cutter, University of South Carolina
Graham A. Tobin, University of South Florida
Sarah Michaels, University of Waterloo
El Niño and 9/11 Quick Response Research Projects (Christine M. Rodrigue)
For several years, I put in for Quick Response grants, usually with a colleague at Cal State, Chico, Eugenie Rovai and once with Mike Davis, then at Cal State, Northridge. Some topics included major urban earthquakes in North America, in which we would look at social equity issues in media coverage of the quake, looking for seriously underreported areas, with an eye towards identifying community leaders with whom FEMA or State offices of Emergency Management could work to get assistance out. We put one in for chaparral fire hazard in California, again with an eye towards social equity. And, with the predictions of an especially bad El Niño year in 1997-98, we put in for that possible disaster, too, again with similar concerns of media representation and social equity. In 1996, I put in for one to look at what would go on in NASA if the spacecraft Cassini, carrying plutonium, broke up in the atmosphere during its flyby manoeuvre of August, 1997. That one was turned down as too technological, the program being more interested in natural hazard events. All the others were pre-approved.
El Niño of 1997-98
By February of 1998, it was evident that the somewhat belated El Niño winter of 1997/98 was, in fact, going to be epic all over the State. Eugenie and I began to solicit graduate students to constitute an unpaid field team, all expenses covered, and three with hazards interests signed right up: Jim Hotchkiss, then in the Coast Guard, Adam Henderson, and Stacy Potter. All three had ties to Southern California, as did I, and so we elected to go there and work out of my other home in Los Angeles. We tried to get Mike Davis, but he had schedule conflicts and said for us to just go on without him. Boulder approved our budget and we headed down in torrential rain. We used some of our time simply riding around Southern California, observing landslides, tarped hillsides, and blocked roads. Jim Hotchkiss took us to Port Hueneme and we talked with Coast Guard officers there, who pointed us to some particularly hard hit areas where they had been helping out. He also had a friend, Jim Woods, who worked in Cal OES and arranged for us to visit the FEMA/Cal OES field office in Pasadena to collect maps of the worst incidents. The students found the high security and militaristic atmosphere of the field office to be a little off-putting, though they could understand some of its context.
We arranged for a subscription to the Los Angeles Times and collected back issues for content analysis back up in Chico. We collected telephone books for all of Southern California's multiple area codes to help us develop a regionally stratified and proportional random sample of phone numbers to elicit residents' mental maps of the hardest-hit areas to compare with media representation. We eventually wound up with 54 completed surveys, not bad for a quick field trip.
Residents' mental maps featured basically only two really upscale coastal communities: Malibu and Laguna Beach. There were sporadic references to other counties elsewhere in California. Respondents said that they got their information from television, newspaper, and radio. The paper most often mentioned was the L.A. Times, which is why we picked that paper for content analysis. Respondents said that they expected a bad winter from all the coverage and most of them claimed to engage in some mitigation behaviors, usually putting together an emergency kit. Very few of the homeowners had flood insurance, however, but they all had elaborate rationalizations for this, rationalizations that often contradicted one another. Turning to the L.A. Times, we found that it did quite a comprehensive job, mentioning El Niño-related incidents in 23 different counties, with relatively little mention of Malibu and Laguna Beach. Its coverage was quite out of synch with locals' perceptions of local impacts, which was a little puzzling, given that respondents mentioned the paper so often. Perhaps they were getting their impressions from some other source, such as local TV, but were saying that they read the paper. Our results became Quick Response Report 107, and I think it is representative of the kinds of projects the Quick Response program generates.
Media and September 11th
Another project was not so typical. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Boulder put out a call to the whole hazards community, asking them please to do something with this tragedy, allowing us to do Quick Response projects outside of the normal review and pre-approval process. I phoned the Center and said that I had no real desire to go to New York, but I would be willing to do one of my typical media content analysis pieces and would only need money for paper and printer cartridges. They said "go for it" and gave me $230 to defray these costs.
Again, I picked the Los Angeles Times as a major national paper but one not within the two attacked cities. This time, I used the online edition, because, basically, that is how I access the paper, and I find that it corresponds very closely to the paper editions. I was pretty daunted by this project, because I had never done anything related to terrorism as a sociogenic hazard and had no literature background in the topic to help me formulate hypotheses. So, I basically came up with a few ideas from the hazards and media criticism literatures: I expected the Times to provide little focus on the context behind these events, to focus more on impacts on companies and employers over employees, and to indulge in sensationalism.
I decided to focus on the main theme of an entire front-screen story rather than classify each sentence. I also decided to use an inductive and emergent classification system, which is a first for me, since I tend to be much more quantitative and theoretical in orientation, rather than qualitative. This entailed writing down one word or phrase that described the story's focus, such as "reactions," "impacts," "response," "restoration," "reconstruction," "mitigation," "diplomacy," "military," and "investigation." I put the headline and its classification/description in an Excel spreadsheet and sorted on classification after the first week. I found cases where I was using different words to describe the same sort of thing (e.g., "response" and "emergency response") and so I reclassified them consistently. After a couple weeks of this, I had a consistent system worked out and used it for the six weeks of Quick Response Report 146 and the twelve weeks of a more extended project that was included in the Boulder anthology on 9/11 (Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post-disaster Research). I also found that these themes themselves seem to fall into three larger themes, or metastories: the disaster, the crime, the war.
I followed the change in emphasis among these themes and metastories over time, finding that the disaster story dropped out of dominance within a couple of weeks, with the war story taking over from then to the end of the study period. This change in emphasis may not have been for the best in keeping society's attention on the needs of the victims, which certainly didn't conveniently ease in a couple of weeks. There was hardly any coverage of the context for this attack, as expected.
The Times did engage in sensationalism, such as its endless links to videos of the second plane hitting the South Tower and pictures of the collapse of the two buildings. Unexpectedly, however, the Times was quite balanced in the amount of front screen coverage it gave to working people and to businesses, which is a heartening development.
Conclusions
These two projects, particularly the latter, have impacted my research agenda and methodological range. I have become more interested in sociogenic disasters, building on my earlier project on the use of plutonium in the space program. I am working on a project that compares the FBI response to its field officers' concerns about several of the men who would become the hijackers and assassins of 9/11 with the flawed risk management decision-making in NASA, which led to the crash of Challenger and Columbia. I'll be presenting part of that work tomorrow in an 8 am Hazards session.
I have also become more comfortable with qualitative methodologies. The 9/11 and Columbia project analyzes texts about these tragedies, not from a literature content analytic approach but from a more historical and archival approach, which is a new one for me.
My one reservation about the Quick Response program, which has kept me from applying for pre-approval the last couple of years, is the requirement that researchers secure Human Subjects approval from our campus Institutional Review Boards. This is almost impossible on my campus: They want fully developed interview schedules and consent forms and generally are not at all sympathetic to the kind of open-ended and unpredictable research that is the heart and soul of the Quick Response program. Navigating my graduate students through the IRB has begun to affect my interest in the social sciences in general: I am beginning to do collaborative projects in biogeography, returning to my physical geography roots, so that I don't need to go through the kind of onerous process created by service-oriented academics under very serious Federal pressure to do the right thing by individual human research subjects. The goal is laudable, but the implementation is seriously flawed and may prove an impediment to further Quick Response research. If possible, I'd suggest that Human Subjects clearance be done in one place, Boulder, where the IRB there can become very familiar with the program and receptive through familiarity.
Notes on the Panel Discussion Following the Presentations
Quick Response research draws on the field tradition of geography and geographers are especially well suited to Quick Research studies, due to their training in physical science, social science, and the geospatial techniques. The regional geography tradition also gives us some appreciation for descriptive and empirical work.
A possible problem with Quick Response research is that it is given to what Ken Hewitt calls "eventism." Another big problem with it is that the individual projects often are not followed up by refereed publications. Perhaps the work is too quick and dirty, so descriptive, that people don't want to expend the effort to theorize their work and correct the empirical deficiencies imposed by such short-term collection of ephemeral data. Quick Response research can be quite heuristic, however, serving as seed money and pilot studies for larger projects funded by major granting agencies.
Like all qualitative research, Quick Response research lacks quantitative rigor, but that is more than made up for by its empirical richness, the value of collecting perishable and rapidly deteriorating data, and its value providing a triangulated view into more standardized datasets. For the researcher, the Quick Response projects can have great heuristic value, raising questions that fruitfully change a researcher's interests or methodologies. Similarly, Quick Response research can support longer term research projects in an area by initiating the contacts that might be cultivated eventually to acquire the "insider's view" of a community and a given disaster. Quick Response projects, on their own, do not give a researcher enough time to develop these insider ties and views.
A couple of panelists described the profound emotional difference between experiencing a disaster as a victim and experiencing its aftermath as a scientific observer. They both mentioned how their direct and personal prior experiences made them uncomfortable coming into a disaster-hit area in the immediate aftermath and possibly adding to the distress of the victims. There was some discussion that too quick entry into the field can be pointless, if victims are still too traumatized to talk about what happened to them and if emergency workers are too busy in the first few days to be diverted into conversations with researchers.
The Boulder Quick Response program requires that a potential disaster be described in a proposal, which, if approved, grants pre-clearance for a similar disaster within a year's time frame. Writing these feels vaguely ghoulish as a result, as though Quick Response researchers are the "ambulance chasers" of academia.
Quick Response projects have a very immediate and improvised quality, so the issue of training came up. There was discussion of how the Disaster Research Center, then at Ohio State and now at the University of Delaware, used to train large numbers of graduate students in the spring terms on such subjects as survey design and administration, focus groups, and interviewing so that they would be ready in the event a hurricane or other seasonal disaster hit in the summer. The idea of trying to standardize procedures was vigorously criticized, too, because the value of Quick Response research lies precisely in its variety and the creativity of seasoned researchers forced to improvise in real-time. The need of new scholars for some sort of exposure to the kinds of things people have done in the past and analysis of methodological dead-ends to avoid remained a concern. A question from a graduate student in the audience about how to get involved led to panelists' discussing how Quick Response proposals specifically favor projects that include students in the field teams, as a way of building the interest of the upcoming generation in the hazards field.
There was a lot of discussion about the extent to which Quick Response research has actually entered into policy discussions. The conclusion was that there have been few impacts, but that these few successes have tended to be with Federal agencies, rather than with State or local agencies.
Media representations can be completely misleading, sending research teams and disaster assistance to the wrong areas. Many journalists want to do a good job, but it's hard to do with their deadline pressures. Some journalists pursue "beats," including natural hazards, and are allowed to do lengthy research to develop detailed, lengthy, multi-part series. The hazards community should try to identify such reporters and cultivate relationships with them to improve reportage in a disaster. Perhaps Quick Response projects could be arranged to include journalists as part of the research teams themselves.
Several people on the panel and in the audience concurred that Human Subjects clearance is almost impossible to get from most campus Institutional Review Boards. Some sort of solution is necessary to keep the IRB issue from restricting Quick Response research, while still ensuring that human subjects are treated with dignity and privacy. Centralizing review at Boulder would help individual researchers expending efforts each year to bring their campus IRBs up to speed, with varying outcomes.
The best-known Quick Response research program is the NSF-funded Quick Response program housed at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Other Quick Response programs include another NSF program, Small Research Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER); the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute program, Learning from Earthquakes (which has funded geographers); the National Transportation Safety Board; and the International Hurricane Center.
first placed on the web: 03/18/04
last revised: 03/19/04
maintained by C.M. Rodrigue