Shakhawat Tanim, Brenton Wiernik, Steven Reader, Yujie Hu
Article first published online: 10 Dec 2021, Journal of Environmental Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101742
Dr. Yujie Hu – Predictors of hurricane evacuation decisions: A meta-analysis
ABSTRACT: We systematically review and meta-analyze quantitative prediction models for hurricane evacuation decisions. Drawing on data from 33 prediction models and 29,873 households, we estimate distributions of effects on evacuation decisions for 25 predictors. Mobile home occupancy, evacuation orders, and having an evacuation plan showed the largest positive effects on evacuation, whereas increased age and Black race showed the largest negative effects. These results highlight the importance of both social-economic-structural factors and government action, such as evacuation orders, for enabling evacuation behaviors. Moderator analyses showed that models built using real-hurricane decisions showed larger effects than models of hypothetical decisions, especially for the strongest predictors. Additionally, models in Florida had more consistent results than for other U.S. states, and models with a larger number of covariates showed smaller effect sizes than models with fewer covariates. Importantly, our study improves methodologically and inferentially over previous reviews of this literature.
Read the full publication at the Journal of Environmental Psychology.