Evacuation Decision Making and Behavioral Responses: Individual and Household

In the first part of this white paper we review the history of research on evacuation decision making. A wide range of factors has been found that affect people's evacuation decisions after they hear hurricane forecasts and other information. Risk judgments are a major part of the decision, and hurricane risk perceptions have been studied from many different perspectives. This section ends with two summary diagrams illustrating how the different factors relate to each other. In the second part we turn to work testing models that predict evacuation rates for actual hurricanes in addition to measuring the relative importance of decision factors. We discuss examples of multiple regression and ethnographic decision modeling. The last part of the paper includes suggestions for the workshop about future research that would draw on the strengths of the earlier work reviewed while dealing more directly with risk and the information in and timing of hurricane forecasts.