Evacuation Decision Making and Behavioral Responses: Individual and Household

Researchers have examined a wide range of factors that affect evacuation decisions after people hear hurricane forecasts and other information. This review of the literature focuses on three broad areas of research that often overlap: warning, risk perception, and evacuation research. Whereas it is challenging to demarcate the literature along these lines, we believe each of these areas represents important dimensions of evacuation decision making. The literature on warning focuses to varying degrees on warning as a social process, rather than a simple result of hearing official warnings. Warnings by themselves do not motivate evacuation—people must perceive risk. The extensive literature on objective and…