New Media in times of crisis
An interdisciplinary look at research focused around how people organize during crises.
Emergency and crisis
Interested in Learning More?
A key area where my research teams focus involves emergencies, crises, and disasters, and how communication happens during these time-sensitive situations. We study disasters, like Hurricane Harvey, and we’ve studied emergencies such as how universities communicate during active shooter situations. We also partner with other researchers, like civil engineers, to run simulations on how evacuations likely occur during disasters. Feel free to explore some of our research publications and our work in progress.
911 and social media
Our team is analyzing data we collected where we studied how, when, and why people call 9-1-1 to report crimes and medical emergencies. Stay tuned for more details that will be coming as soon as we publish this research.
nsf grant: hurricanes
In September 2017, our team received a National Science Grant to study how people posted calls for help on social media when the 9-1-1 phone system was not viewed as reliable. Here is the link that gives all the details of our grant
simulating a fire evacuation
One of our teams decided to partner with Civil Engineering and we ran a simulation of what might happen now that we can communicate quite well during an evacuation. While we can get the word out through various communication technologies, that does not mean we will save lives. Unfortunately in our research published in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, we found that there is a rush to the road to evacuate and the challenges become one of transportation infrastructure instead of communication.
organizational crisis response
Have you ever noticed that when an organization experiences a crisis, it will often issue an apology and then say what they are doing to make sure it never happens again? These are called crisis message strategies, and our teams have studied how organizations use these to explain crises to a host of stakeholders. Ashley Barrett and Keri Stephens studied how British Petroleum communicated technical explanations using Twitter when they experienced an oil spill. Our teams have also studied how organizations use various crisis messages when responding to a pet recall, as well as how these vary across stakeholders.
