1
READING KATRINA: INFORMATION SOURCES AND DECISION-MAKING IN
RESPONSE TO A NATURAL DISASTER
PAPER SUBMITTED TO
SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL
FOR CONSIDERATION FOR INCLUSION IN THE
SPECIAL ISSUE ON HURRICANE KATRINA
by
Susanna Priest,1 Kenneth Campbell, and Hilary Fussell
University of South Carolina
Stephen Banning
Louisiana State University
and
Karen Taylor
Tulane University
February, 2006
1
Corresponding author to whom inquiries should be addressed at spriest@gwm.sc.edu or
College of Mass Communications and Information Studies, 4000 Carolina Coliseum, University of
South Carolina, Columbia SC 29208. This research was supported by a grant from the Office of
the Vice President for Research at the University of South Carolina-Columbia.
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READING KATRINA: INFORMATION SOURCES AND DECISION-MAKING IN
RESPONSE TO A NATURAL DISASTER
ABSTRACT: We conducted structured depth interviews with 114 Katrina
evacuees in four states (South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana).2 We
hypothesized that “knowledge gaps” or differential access to information and/or
differences in education might distinguish those who evacuated earlier from
those who evacuated later. Our qualitative results did not support this; rather,
they indicate that interpersonal communication, mass media information, and
local weather knowledge interacted in the period leading up to the decision to
evacuate, with respondents across demographic categories telling remarkably
similar stories. For two-thirds of the respondents, interpersonal communication
appeared to be the crucial factor in decisions to evacuate. Most evacuees we
talked to, regardless of education, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, had access
to extensive mass media information about the storm. Many relied on various
“opinion leaders” within their own interpersonal networks to interpret this
information for them. However, our study also provides quantitative evidence
(although not based on a probability sample) that among those we interviewed,
poorer people, people who relied on media information more exclusively in the
period prior to making a decision to evacuate, and to a lesser extent AfricanAmericans were all more likely to have evacuated more slowly. Combined with
our qualitative observation of the importance of interpersonal communication and
understood in the context of social network studies describing “weak ties” among
the urban poor,3 these data strongly suggest that isolation from social contacts
that could serve as vital interpersonal information sources was likely a crucial
factor slowing evacuation responses among some New Orleans residents.
KEYWORDS: Disaster communication, opinion leadership, multi-step flow,
media impact, local knowledge, knowledge gaps, social networks, social isolation
2
Of the 114 interviews, 106 yielded usable tape transcripts. Due to variations in interviewer
experience and difficult field conditions, completeness of demographic and other data varies for
the 106 participants. Most analyses are based on smaller Ns, as indicated throughout this paper.
3 We would like to thank University of South Carolina doctoral student Jessica Leu for suggesting
the relevance of the “weak ties” literature.
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READING KATRINA: INFORMATION SOURCES AND DECISION-MAKING IN
RESPONSE TO A NATURAL DISASTER
INTRODUCTION
Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast in Southeast
Louisiana on Monday, August 29, 2006. At least 1300 people were killed, based
on bodies so far recovered in Louisiana and neighboring Mississippi; speculation
continues that the true death toll may be higher and may never be known.
Hundreds of thousands of New Orleans area residents scattered to nearby states
– either before or after the storm hit – or sought shelter in New Orleans itself.
Natural questions for communication researchers to ask are whether fewer
people would have been killed had evacuations taken place earlier, and whether
mass media warnings were sufficient to prevent unnecessary deaths. Because
over two-thirds of pre-Katrina New Orleans residents were African American and
substantial numbers of these were poor, issues of equity of information access
and “knowledge gaps” (Tichenor et al., 1970) are inextricably intertwined with
these questions. However, New Orleans is also characterized by a “hurricane
culture” in which long-time residents have substantial personal knowledge of
previous storms and are in positions to advise others in a classic pattern of
“opinion leadership” (Lazersfeld et al., 1944). This study uses information from
depth interviews with about 114 Katrina evacuees in the states of Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina to evaluate the extent to which
4
particular information sources – mediated and interpersonal – contributed to New
Orleans area evacuees’ decisions to leave.
While media weather warnings and their interpretations by those with
different levels of prior knowledge and understanding are undoubtedly essential
elements of such a situation, it has long been known that interpersonal
communication networks are more strongly influential in decision-making. Paul
Lazarsfeld’s classic research on voting behaviors highlighted the importance of
interpersonal networks and introduced the theoretical concepts of two-step flow
and opinion leadership. Lazarsfeld’s work was built on by his student, Elihu Katz
(1957), who posited that persuasion was a fundamentally interactive process
achieved by a group rather than by any particular message. Mass media were
hypothesized to provide information but have little direct impact on the majority of
the population. Decisions appeared to depend on input mediated by each
individual’s social network, and in particular the role of key individuals often
referred to as “opinion leaders.” Alternate terms have been proposed during the
decades since this model was first proposed, such as “advisors” (Black, 1982),
“early adopters” (Rogers, 1983), and “influentials” (Wieman et. al., 1991). These
alternate terms, it has been argued, may better represent what actually occurs in
the social network, since it is not clear whether there is always a true
leader/follower dichotomy, but for purposes of this paper we will use the term
“opinion leader” in order to emphasize the relation of our study to the existing
literature.
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The original model proposed by Katz suggested that opinion leaders are
distinctive in three ways: who they are (in terms of values represented and
personality traits such as risk tolerance), what they know (since different
individuals serve as opinion leaders for different topics of relevance to a
network), and who they know (that is, their centrality within a social network, the
heterogeneity within these networks, and network size). The relationship
between opinion leadership and the mass media is not completely clear. Early
research suggested that opinion leaders follow mass media more closely, and in
particular read more print news sources. Later research has called into question
whether there is any significant link between opinion leadership and mass media
use, arguing that competence can be achieved based on a variety of information
sources and that opinion leaders are just as likely to list “interpersonal
communication” as their primary sources for information and decision making as
are non-leaders (Wieman, 1991). This is potentially important to our study of
Katrina evacuees because both “leaders” and “followers” reported generally
equivalent access to mass media, largely television, sources.
Sociological literature on media-audience relationships in natural disasters
shows that the media’s role can be divided into three phases – the preparedness
phase, the after-the-impact phase, and the recovery phase. The present
research is concerned with the preparedness phase, when residents decided
whether to stay and ride out the hurricane or to leave until the storm had passed
over. Understanding the media’s role in the preparedness stage is all the more
critical because New Orleans residents had been warned time and again that the
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city could be flooded by a major hurricane; the local newspaper, the TimesPicayune, published a major series of articles on the potential disaster during the
previous year, and the Weather Channel had also reported on the possible
disaster.
Although sparse, mass communications literature on media-audience
relationships during disasters suggest an active role for the media during all three
phases (Abe, 1978; Ledingham, 1985; Sood, et al., 1987; Spencer et al.,1992).
The assumption is that the media provide information during the preparedness
stage and “the audience passively receives it and acts accordingly” (Perez-Lugo,
2004, p. 212) That is to say, the media are seen as a vehicle through which
information – especially official information – can be communicated directly to
persons who will be affected by an impending disaster and those persons will
follow the instructions or advice given to them (Blanchard-Boehm, 1988). PerezLugo (2004) cautioned that using this “manager’s perspective,” which sees the
media as “management tools,” might not give enough attention to the audience
as a factor, such as whether the audience is active or passive.
However, Perez-Lugo did not investigate audience use of media or media
content in decision-making in the preparedness stage – a gap this study
addresses. While she found that once audience members heard about Hurricane
Georges in Puerto Rico, they left the media turned on, she did not explore the
degree to which the media played a role in their decision making as to how to
prepare for the oncoming disaster (p. 217). “Interestingly,” she observed, “most
of the interviewees said that they followed the standard safety recommendations
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not because the media said to do so but because they form part of a body of
common sense knowledge, based on previous personal and collective
experiences with hurricanes” (p. 218). The interviewees were interested in factual
information about the hurricane, such as its physical location, but not the
commentary of the announcer. The present study examines the responses of
Hurricane Katrina victims to investigate the role of mass media in their decisionmaking, whether they sought information from the mass media to facilitate their
decision-making, and if so, what kind of information was most important.
Our own findings certainly reinforce the importance of the social network
as an information source and crucial influence on decision-making. Our findings
on the role of opinion leaders per se, as originally conceived in political
communication studies, are less clear-cut, but suggest that for the topic of
hurricane evacuation – at least in New Orleans’ “hurricane culture” – opinion
leadership patterns may be unlike those found for other subject areas. Opinion
leadership in this context depends on a competence that is not based so much
on heightened consumption of media information but more often grounded in
lived experience, potentially related to both age and to time lived in the area.
Nevertheless, this “local knowledge” in turn imbues the individuals who possess
it with the authority to interpret media information and make decisions about what
to do, decisions others clearly are dependent on them to make.
Other disaster research has also emphasized the importance of two-step
flow and opinion leaders. Research has shown, for example, that communities
with dense social networks, such that members are comfortable with group
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deliberation processes and possessed of a sense of self-efficacy, are more likely
to engage in disaster management that is effective, though sometimes less rapid
(Buckland & Rahman, 1999). The importance of similarity of sociodemographics
for opinion leadership is emphasized in studies of race and ethnic minorities
during disasters, suggesting that relative to mass media or other mainstream
“authoritative” sources associated with the dominant Anglo population,
interpersonal communication may be even more influential among Latina/o and
African-American populations (Fothergill et. al., 1999).
In struggling to understand why some people made an earlier decision to
leave while others did not leave until later, yet people from all walks of life
seemed to tell remarkably similar stories, we also drew on the literature
concerning “weak ties” among the urban poor (Granovetter, 1983; Tigges et al.,
1998). This literature suggests that neighborhoods representing concentrations
of economically disadvantaged individuals may be disempowered because of
fewer ties with acquaintances outside the neighborhood. These “weak” or
acquaintance ties (as opposed to the “strong ties” of family, household members,
persons with similar backgrounds, and other close friends) are considered
important because they may link or “bridge” members of an otherwise isolated,
homogeneous group with other groups who can provide a broader array of
information and thus serve as important information resources to the group. Most
often studied with respect to employment-seeking patterns – in which individuals
may draw on “strong” or broader but “weaker” ties in trying to identify new job
opportunities – the “weak ties” phenomenon may especially characterize socially
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isolated neighborhoods with high concentrations of urban poor and relatively few
individuals connected to mainstream society outside the neighborhood. This
theory helped to explain why some people seemed to belong to groups in which
the social network providing them with information about the seriousness of the
storm was activated sooner rather than later, yet the dynamics of interpersonal
communication still seemed important across demographic categories.
As our sample was based primarily on convenience and snowball
techniques, we could not directly test these ideas in a formal way. Interpersonal
communication certainly seemed more powerful among many of those we
interviewed, regardless of demographic categories, yet some groups still left
earlier than others. Below, after considering the “shared narrative” of our
interviewees qualitatively, we present quantitative evidence that within our group
of interviewees, poor people, people who got most of their pre-hurricane
information from the media rather than interpersonal sources, and – although to a
somewhat lesser extent – African-Americans left later. Whether this should be
attributed to characteristics of the particular social organization of New Orleans
or the special nature of hurricane-related communications and New Orleans’
“hurricane culture” is unknown. Our respondents were scattered among many
neighborhoods prior to evacuating, making analysis of specific neighborhood
characteristics or differences difficult. However, our observations are certainly
consistent with the argument that residents of urban ghettos may suffer from lack
of access to information resources through relative social isolation, despite
having equal access to mass media information.
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METHODS
We collected interviews in four states, based on a protocol designed to
elicit chronological narratives from interviewees about their information and
communication experiences.4 Most interviews were conducted within two months
of the disaster. An initial subset of eleven interviews was conducted by a faculty
member and two doctoral students working under the supervision of a second
faculty member in South Carolina. These interviews served as a pilot test of the
interview protocol and procedures. The interviewees were recruited from a
central processing center that had been set up as a “one-stop shop” in Columbia,
SC, for evacuees relocated there to apply for various forms of assistance for
which they were eligible. This initial experience alerted us to a variety of practical
challenges, including the desire of some families to remain together throughout
the interview, a circumstance that we attempted to accommodate, and to the
presence of post-traumatic stress symptoms among some of the interviewees. All
interviews, including the South Carolina pilot interviews, were transcribed by a
team of University of South Carolina graduate students.
Parallel to evacuation patterns for those fleeing Katrina, the bulk of the
interviews (84) were conducted in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, area. This
material was gathered during a three week period beginning four weeks after
Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. (Most of these interviews were gathered
during the first two weeks, that is, within six weeks of evacuation.) Twelve
4
Interviewees received an incentive with a value of $50. In South Carolina this incentive was paid
in cash; elsewhere, in the form of a discount store gift certificate.
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graduate students from Louisiana State University were recruited to perform the
in-depth interviews. All of the graduate students had had prior research courses.
Three were doctoral students. Information on the interviewing process including
the protocol was distributed electronically for interviewers to study. A two-hour
training session was then administered, which included interviewing techniques,
a question-by-question review of the protocol and practice interviews in which the
participants paired off and interviewed each other. The protocol was then
discussed further.
Louisiana interviewers were given cards for distribution to the interviewees
with toll-free numbers for local counseling services that had been set up
specifically for Katrina evacuees. Consent forms, protocol forms, demographic
forms, cassette recorders, microcassette tapes and incentive discount store gift
cards were also distributed at the same time. Some interviewers who seemed to
have less confidence were initially paired with more experienced interviewers for
support and further mentoring. Sensitivity to the interviewees was stressed.
The Louisiana interviewees were recruited from a Salvation Army shelter,
a church clothing distribution center next to a Red Cross shelter, and a churchaffiliated food distribution facility in the City of Baton Rouge. Each of these
facilities had been set up specifically for Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
Additionally, snowball samples were conducted in the community; that is,
students were asked to recruit additional interviewees based on word-of-mouth
referrals. Because over 200,000 evacuees descended on Baton Rouge after
Hurricane Katrina, participants were fairly easy to find. As deemed necessary,
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field work was directly supervised by a faculty member. A week after the initial
interviews were conducted, debriefing was conducted with the interviewers.
Some interviewers expressed interviewer fatigue and a few had encountered
interviewees who were still under stress.
An additional nine interviews were conducted in Tuscaloosa, AL, by two
graduate students of the University of Alabama under the general supervision of
a faculty member from Tulane who was herself an evacuee with visiting
professor status at UA. Approximately nine additional interviews were conducted
in Texas by the same Tulane faculty member, primarily through the West
Houston Association of Ministries, a non-denominational relief organization that
assisted evacuees with housing, food, clothing, and other basic necessities. The
remainder of the Texas interviews were conducted at the temporary offices set
up in Houston by Tulane University with the purpose of broadening the range of
interviewee demographics.
Criteria for being included in the interviews were being eighteen years of
age and having lived (and evacuated from) a location within approximately a fiftymile radius of New Orleans proper. The fifty-mile radius criterion was used
because many areas considered to be part of New Orleans area (such as the
well known and hard-hit Chalmette area where a series of helicopter rescues
took place) are actually outside the city limits of New Orleans. Residents of the
Louisiana City of Slidell, which was hit by Katrina but is outside the fifty-mile limit,
and nearby locations including Lafayette, Louisiana, were excluded, as were
residents of Biloxi, Mississippi, almost leveled by Katrina. All of those interviewed
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were evacuees. No one who stayed in New Orleans continuously without
evacuating was included because the interview recruitment sites were all at
various distances away from the city.
The interviews ranged in length from ten or fifteen minutes (generally
characterizing inexperienced interviewers’ initial experiences) to over one hour. A
half hour to 45 minutes was typical. A few of the interviews were lost due to
failures of the recording equipment or human error, but most were successfully
captured on tape and transcribed for analysis. The results reported here depend
primarily on the transcripts, but also on comments and observations supplied by
the faculty supervisors.
Respondent demographics
Those interviewed were roughly 40% male and 60% female. All
respondents stated that English was the language spoken at home. The final
sample included what appear to be disproportionate numbers of students (23%)
and those age 18-24 (27%).5 The sample was 38% African-American, whereas
the 2004 census estimate for New Orleans was 68% African-American. It may be
that evacuees available for interview were somewhat unrepresentative in this
respect. As only 36% of the students interviewed and 33% of those age 18 to 24
were African-American, a portion of the sample’s racial distortion can reasonably
be attributed to student interviewers tending to recruit respondents like
themselves, but this may be only a partial explanation.
5
All proportions reported here are based only on interviews for which the demographic item in
question was available; in other words, in each case the proportions exclude missing values from
the analysis.
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A broad range of pre-Katrina household incomes were represented, with
26% reporting $10,000 or less and 14% reporting $80,000 or more. Less than
4% had below a high school education, and less than 6% had a graduate degree;
62% reported a high school education, a GED, or “some college.” About 60%
reported that they had lived in New Orleans their entire lives, with the rest
ranging from a year or less of residence to 45 years. While we certainly cannot
claim that our sample was fully representative of the pre-Katrina New Orleans
population, we can and do claim that a very broad range of respondents was
included, making our results somewhat more robust despite some distortion of
proportions. For purposes of qualitative analysis, the range of respondents
included is especially important, allowing us to capture elements that seemed
broadly shared across demographic group boundaries.
RESULTS
Decision-making and Information Sources
Of the respondents interviewed, a slim majority (about 55 of 103, or
approximately 53%) found out about the storm and its seriousness either from
interpersonal sources exclusively (17 or 15%) or from some combination of
media and interpersonal sources (38 or 27%).6 A somewhat smaller proportion
(48 of 104, or 47%) seemed to get all of their initial information from the media.
Almost all of the respondents did get information about the storm from a variety
of media sources; nevertheless, interpersonal sources typically seemed more
6
Data in this paragraph should be considered rough estimates and are based on subjective
evaluation (not measurement) summarizing answers to multiple questions and probes.
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influential in focusing people’s attention on the seriousness of this particular
storm in a city long accustomed to hurricane warnings and evacuations,
consistent with the literature cited earlier. Further, when asked directly about the
moment they decided – or were asked or even ordered – to evacuate, most (48
out of 93 for whom we felt the information could reasonably be evaluated, or
52%) specifically cited interpersonal sources (such as a phone call or a visit from
a neighbor or someone from the family coming into their bedroom) as the
deciding factor, and an additional 17% (16 our of 93) reported responding to a
combination of media and interpersonal sources. Less than a third (about 29 out
of 93, or 31%) cited media alone.
These interpersonal sources often provided crucial interpretations of the
media messages and even respondents’ own observations:
“Just neighbors that was hearing like, the same thing we was hearing,
come to the porch, it’s time to leave.”
The above quote was from someone who saw water coming in under her door
and right through the brick walls of her home. Even so, it seemed to be her
neighbors’ comments that fully defined the situation for her. The same was true
for this respondent, who was also alerted by neighbors to the situation:
“Anytime there’s a hurricane that forms in the Gulf, that’s coming towards
the Gulf Shore, everybody in New Orleans talks about it . . . . When it was
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getting right on us, and I still didn’t believe it was gonna – I mean, I went
to sleep. And I had a neighbor that came downstairs banging on my door
telling me that . . . your apartment’s being flooded.”
A few people made up their minds from media reports or their own direct
observations, but even then discussion with family members almost always
mattered. Typically, couples, families, friends, and co-workers made the decision
to leave on a collective basis:
“I discussed it with my wife and we made [the decision] together, that um,
on Friday night that we should leave around noon on Saturday.”
While not as common, sometimes an official personality appearing on
television (especially the mayor) had a similar effect. Once the mayor declared a
mandatory evacuation, this was a sign to people that the storm was important.
They then evacuated because they recognized that the situation was serious:
“[We realized it was serious] when the mayor said he was gonna make a
statement, to whether we had to have mandatory evacuation. And after
he said it was mandatory, which was the day of the storm, cause the
storm came through that night, that Sunday night. And we left out that
Sunday about 11 o’clock.”
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Another example:
“And then, when I woke up on Sunday and the Mayor got on the air and
said ‘This is it. Get out. Get out of town.’ “
In general, the mayor’s announcement of a mandatory evacuation seemed to be
influential because it marked official recognition of the nature of the storm.
Whether or not it was enforced or enforceable, the fact of the announcement was
a critical indicator of the storm’s seriousness.
Sometimes the key personality was the weather person on TV. The
influence of a personality like that of weathercaster Bob Brook was unmistakable:
“I watch Bob Brook. . . . And if (he) said this is not going to be good. When
he says something like that, you know it is going to be bad. A few people
told me that.”
Or again:
“When he said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, what to do but it’s looking
pretty bad,’ even my husband said we should think about pack[ing] a few
things.”
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A commonly important sign was the announcement of the storm’s
Category 5 status, which appeared in interview after interview as a key marker of
the gravity of the situation:
“[Believed it was serious when] um, I believe it was the Saturday night,
um, when the news media said it was going to be a Category 5.”
Or:
“And um when the wife heard that it was Category 5 that’s when we
decided we was going to leave.”
Even so, the final decision to evacuate was often made with others:
“Well, after it was said that a Category 5 was gonna hit, my family and I
decided we were gonna leave.”
In general, while media information was important, it was regularly passed
along and interpreted by other people, usually family members. These family
members influenced others to attend to media warnings:
“Well my wife told me and she um, got a phone call from a friend of our
son’s about 3 o’clock in the morning, stating um, the strength of the
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hurricane, so that she turned the TV on and she listened to the report. And
she woke me up and said we got to get out of here.”
That the initial sense of alarm came from a family member, an alarm that then
drew attention to media reports, was a common pattern:
“It was actually from my dad [that I initially learned of the seriousness].
Which was followed by the media, after.”
Co-workers, as well as family members and neighbors, also drew attention to
media accounts and helped provide context and interpretation:
“When I got to work and there was no one in the entire restaurant, and
they, everyone, we just had all the TVs on.”
Another evacuee said:
“The night before, we had planned to leave in the morning, but I planned
to leave late morning, late afternoon. And my brother called and said leave
now. . . .So at that point about 10 o’clock we left on Sunday morning. And
that’s because he called and rushed me 3 or 4 hours sooner. . . .”
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The brother had just seen state officials on television imploring residents to
leave.
And sometimes, it was simply that the media had provided the piece of
factual information that residents needed in order to decide to go, in some cases
by confirming information from interpersonal communication but in other cases
exerting independent and deciding influence. Said one respondent who first
heard about the hurricane from the media:
“The TV said it was not going to anyplace but directly to New Orleans.
That’s what made up my mind.”
One resident who gets his news from the newspaper and, during times of bad
weather, the Weather Channel, realized how serious the storm was when he
“looked at CNN and saw that it was a Category 5 and it was coming right through
the mouth of the river.” Another received a phone call from a friend whom she
described as “a real avid weather watcher.” Yet, she still “turned the TV on just to
verify what he said. Because when I went to sleep Friday night everything was
going to be fine.” Another resident, after being called by a friend early in the week
and informed of the hurricane, also needed confirmation of the details through
the media:
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“She’s like, okay the storm is coming for New Orleans, are you staying or
going? I’m like, I’ll call you back, I have to turn on the television, so that’s
how I found out about Katrina.”
It was when the news media reported that the mayor had talked to a hurricane
specialist that one respondent was convinced to pack up and leave:
“And that person had been working with hurricanes for 30 years or
something and he said, ‘listen, this is the big one.’”
Still, she said she and her husband consulted with neighbors in making the final
decision to leave.
Although television was the most common media source, respondents
reported using a variety of media information sources, including the Internet:
“We looked at the Weather Channel, cause we had cable TV, which gave
us some pretty good insight into what was happening, and we also were
online looking at different sources.”
Whether looking for storm information or not, media was almost always present.
A college student reported having the TV on looking at CNN’s coverage of the
hurricane as he prepared to leave New Orleans for the weekend to attend a party
in Baton Rouge, with every intention of returning Sunday. Another reported
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hearing about the hurricane first from the little TV that was always playing at the
coffee shop near where he works.
It is also important to recognize the role of media in the decision-making of
the most reluctant evacuees. One man born and reared in the New Orleans area
and his 78-year-old aunt had never evacuated. But this time, after watching local
TV reports about the Category 5 storm’s path, they both left.
Regardless of what media sources were used, interpretation of the
information and making the decision to leave was almost always a shared
experience in some way. Opinion leadership took several forms and opinion
leaders were not always the first to leave. This respondent was a teacher who
seemed to have a lot of background knowledge of hurricane dynamics and paid
close attention to media reports:
“It’s funny because my wife was in contact with my sister and mother and
we told them to get out of town now. . . . And so, we, my wife and I, just
stayed at the house as long as we could . . . .”
This kind of opinion leadership fits the classic pattern of experts who absorb
more information from the media, then disseminate their conclusions to others.
Other opinion leaders, however, drew more on their own life experience rather
than scientific knowledge or education in interpreting the information they had
absorbed from the media:
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“I wasn’t here during Hurricane Betsy. But she lived here all her life and
that’s when we decided to leave. . . .”
Not all decision makers seemed to have any particular kind of specialized
knowledge that others did not also have, whether from education or direct
experience, but sometimes they paid closer attention to media details, as in this
example:
“On the five o’clock news on Saturday. . . . She said what to think about it.
This hurricane looks like to have a straight force. And even if it deviates
left a little bit, it is still going to be such an impact that you should leave
and what’s to think about: Get out, Get out! . . . That made us leave, 5
o’clock in the morning. I called my sons, I am coming to you.”
Finally, it is important to note that on occasion respondents’ personal
historical knowledge, combined with mistrust of the authorities, could seriously
mislead their reading of the situation. One respondent did not evacuate until after
his neighborhood was in significant trouble:
“Betsy, I was in Betsy 40 years ago. . . . And uh, it was similar to this uh,
Katrina. But the thing was, the water, they didn’t let the water go down,
like [during] Betsy [the] water went down. The problem we had was the
water stood up too long. And that’s where the problem came in.”
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This respondent reported he had had to rescue a paralyzed uncle and other
neighbors by boat, sometimes through their roofs; get them to safety in a school
building; and help find them food. Perhaps with some justification, having access
to television reports of Superdome conditions, he had not wanted to evacuate
there; he also feared that getting on a Coast Guard helicopter would mean giving
up his rights, and he did not leave until forced. Throughout his considerable
ordeal, he kept expecting the water to “go down,” like it had for Betsy.
Group Differences
In exploring the “weak ties” explanation for why social networks in some
groups seemed to activate sooner or more vigorously than others, despite no
obvious differences in hurricane knowledge, education levels, or access to media
information, we looked carefully at other group differences. While our sample is
not representative of the New Orleans population, the differences we observed
are consistent with the concept that levels of social isolation, as well as reliance
on social networks, mattered. Persons reporting household incomes of $10,000
or less left on average almost a full day later than persons reporting other
incomes (average day of evacuation, counting the Saturday before the storm as
“1,” was 2.44 versus 1.67 for others, N = 71, Student’s t = 1.859, two-tailed p =
.079). While it might be hypothesized that persons with such low incomes might
not have had the resources to leave, and this certainly may be true in individual
instances, the question on which these results are based asked about the
25
moment of decision, not the existence of barriers to implementing that decision.
Poor people did not make up their minds to leave as early as others did,
regardless of their ability to evacuate; further, it is important to remember than
many interviewees understood “evacuation” to mean going to a shelter on higher
ground, not necessarily leaving the city.
Adding substantially to the possibility of a “weak ties” or social isolation
explanation, persons who relied primary on mass media information prior to the
storm were almost a half-day later to leave than those who also or primarily relied
on interpersonal communication networks (average day of evacuation = 2.13
versus 1.66, N = 83, Student’s t = 1.747, two-tailed p = .086). Here, we speculate
that reliance on mediated information may be acting as a proxy for being isolated
from interpersonal sources with access to information about the storm’s severity,
sources of the type that might have caused individuals to make up their minds to
leave earlier. African-Americans also left about a half-day later (average day of
evacuation = 2.18 versus 1.71, N = 79, Student’s t = 1.520, two-tailed p = .136).
Interestingly, statistically significant differences were not observed for those who
ultimately based their actual decision on media versus interpersonal sources, nor
were patterns of difference observed when respondents were grouped by
educational level, years lived in the city, gender, or age.
DISCUSSION
Above all, the most prominently shared aspect of decision-making among
almost all of the respondents was that the decision was a matter of interpersonal,
26
usually family, discussion and communication. It is also clear that within these
family discussions, opinion leadership of different kinds mattered strongly to the
final group decision. This leadership could come from someone within or outside
of the family, but most commonly came from someone who contacted others
individually, on an interpersonal basis, rather than a media or political figure seen
on television. The mayor’s announcement of a mandatory evacuation and
weathercasters’ use of the “Category 5” designation were both important markers
of the storm’s seriousness, and many people followed the storm’s path carefully
through media sources. Some seemed strongly affected by the visual images
that they saw there. However, information from the media – while very important
to people’s awareness of conditions – was often interpreted through
interpersonal social networks, punctuated by the reactions of opinion leaders and
decision makers within those networks. Without someone’s receiving a phone
call or a knock on the door, media accounts often stayed in the background,
leaving people in the role of passive observer rather than being taken as a call to
action. Fortunately, in most cases these calls and knocks did take place,
affirming the capacity of the New Orleans community – if not its official
government – to respond appropriately. The astonishing resilience of human
groups and communities under circumstances of physical threat is a recurrent
theme in the sociology of disaster.
Little evidence of “knowledge gaps” between more and less educated
respondents was observed, at least in this qualitative study. Some respondents
who seemed initially to discount Katrina’s seriousness could be found in all walks
27
of life. Some respondents who seemed to recognize the storm’s threat early on
seemed to be drawing on formal scientific knowledge or education, while others
drew on their own life experiences or those of their family, friends, and neighbors,
and yet others relied more directly on mass media information. Almost everyone
we interviewed reported knowing that a serious storm might someday devastate
New Orleans. Whether something they were taught in school or something
learned from the media or from friends and neighbors or in church or as a lesson
handed down in their families, this knowledge was very widely distributed. The
typical and almost universal response to our question on this subject was simply
“Oh, yes” or “All the time.” Very few respondents reported that they had never
realized how bad the situation could get, but many stated they did not believe it
would happen in their lifetime.
The differences between poorer individuals, individuals who did not rely on
interpersonal sources, and African-Americans and their wealthier, less isolated,
and non-minority counterparts are potentially extremely important. Simple access
to information or even transportation is not everything. Interpersonal
communication can be more important than media information, and the latter
alone may not be persuasive. While our data are not sufficient to prove such a
hypothesis, our results are entirely consistent with the argument that urban
neighborhoods characterized by a high concentration of poverty may suffer a
kind of information isolation alongside their relative social isolation in some
cases. Further research should be pursued in this area as it is of vital
significance to enable appropriate responses to future disasters in urban areas,
28
whether natural or caused by acts of terror or war. Access to information
transmitted through social networks could be more important than many other
factors in explaining why some groups ultimately evacuated sooner than others.
Despite the number of reported deaths and the various horror stories
resulting from what is widely believed to have been official mismanagement of
the situation on many fronts, it is believed that 80 to 90% of New Orleans
residents did evacuate on their own. Initial reports that projected mortality in the
tens of thousands did not prove accurate, although to any casual observer it
seems plausible that they certainly could have. Much of the mismanagement had
more to do with the paucity of preparations to physically evacuate, relocate, feed,
house, and ultimately resettle much of the population of New Orleans and the
surrounding area than it did to do with informing that population of the threat. In
other words, system failures did not seem to result from residents’ failures to
understand the storm’s threat; on the contrary, in fact, some refusals to evacuate
may have stemmed as much from distrust of the conditions they would find
waiting for them (or, though not reported in these particular interviews, fears that
looting would or could not be controlled). Without this level of distrust, armed
intervention might possibly never have been needed.
Nevertheless, the prominence of interpersonal communication, the
prevalence and impact of a range of local opinion leaders, and the fact that New
Orleans residents who fully understood the potential of hurricane conditions to
destroy their city yet did not believe it would happen do suggest some strategies
for action with respect to communication. Our conclusion is that knowledge and
29
education are simply not enough. Conventional media reports, while they can
communicate crucial and effective markers of storm severity, including the
statements of official opinion leaders, are also clearly not enough.7 But we also
need to consider whether organized efforts to alert people on an individual basis
– whether through old-fashioned telephone trees, knocking on doors block to
block, acting through churches or neighborhood associations, or issuing
emergency instructions through the media to immediately contact friends, family,
and neighbors – should be explored. Our results suggest these are potentially
more effective than conventional news reports of danger.8 In cities like New
Orleans, such efforts can be built on a base of widely shared hurricane
knowledge – efforts to disseminate which can probably take credit for most
residents’ willingness to evacuate once they understood the situation – to more
effectively alert people when the time has come to take action. And other means
may not reach the most impoverished neighborhoods and the most isolated
gropus.
Finally, while the observation that interpersonal communication – and the
combination of interpersonal and mass media communication – is powerful is not
itself new, this study provides important documentation that this principle has not
changed despite the proliferation of new media technology. In the face of broad,
everyday reliance on newer communication media such as the Internet, cable
7
As other members of our team expect to address separately in future articles, the importance of
“small media” such as radios and cell phones under emergency conditions like those found in
New Orleans during Katrina and among New Orleans evacuees elsewhere should not be
underestimated.
8 Like all warning systems, this type of system, if used too often, may eventually be ignored, so
clear channels for making decisions about when to activate such a system would obviously be
needed as well.
30
television, and cell phones, as well as the more traditional broadcast television,
radio, and newspapers, the dissemination of crucial life-saving information about
Katrina took place as much or more through social networks and interpersonal
contact as through direct exposure to the news.
31
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