Volume 18, Issue 2

As emergency management evolved to encompass a focus on supporting safe growth and development for communities, the role and responsibilities of government became increasingly complex with aspects of emergency management becoming quintessential. Issues with communication uncovered the need to understand how managers collect, disseminate, and adapt critical information through understanding crisis type and local community needs. This paper examines the use of crisis communication strategies in emergency management practice and how these strategies have been impacted by Situational Crisis Communication Theory. This theory’s prescriptive approach connects leaders’ response to strategies emphasizing adaptation to local community needs and crisis type. Utilizing structural equation modeling and qualitative analysis, results from a nationwide survey of county, and county-equivalent, emergency managers in the United States is included. The survey focused on the relationship between crisis communication strategies, local community needs, crisis type, and perceived resilience. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significant indicators impacting use of crisis communication strategies by emergency managers along with critical importance of adaptation to local community needs and crisis type. In addition, the paper unveils practical recommendations for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the field of emergency management and its counterparts.

Over the last decade, communities have become increasingly aware of the risks they face. They are threatened by natural disasters, which may be exacerbated by climate change and the movement of land masses. Growing globalization has made a pandemic due to the rapid spread of highly infectious diseases ever more likely. Societal discord breeds its own threats, not the least of which is the spread of radical ideologies giving rise to terrorism. The accelerating rate of technological change has bred its own social and economic risks. This widening spectrum of risk poses a difficult question to every community – how resilient will the community be to the extreme events it faces. In this paper, we present a new approach to answering that question. It is based on the stress testing of financial institutions required by regulators in the United States and elsewhere. It generalizes stress testing by expanding the concept of “capital” beyond finance to include the other “capitals” (e.g., human, social) possessed by a community. Through use of this approach, communities can determine which investments of its capitals are most likely to improve its resilience. We provide an example of using the approach, and discuss its potential benefits.

The job placement of emergency management degree program graduates has been an enduring point of conversation for over a decade https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/readinglist.aspx, https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=478470, https://doi.org/10.2202/1547-7355.1910, https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/readinglist.aspx, https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/readinglist.aspx, https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/latest/2018.aspx. Whether graduates are employable, whether they are getting jobs, and why some get jobs and others do not have been of concern. Yet, until recently, no empirical study had examined the extent to which emergency management degree holders who want emergency management jobs actually get them. Jensen and Kirkpatrick (2020), found that the majority of graduates who intended such jobs got them, while almost a third did not. Jensen and Kirkpatrick (2019), proposed a theoretical framework that might guide research on job outcomes of emergency management degree program graduates, including job placement. This manuscript reports the authors' efforts to utilize the theoretical framework to explore the difference between those graduates who wanted and secured an emergency management position post-graduation and those who wanted one but did not. Specifically, this manuscript reports initial findings and challenges related to this question in the context of a theoretical framework of job placement and the current state of emergency management higher education nationally.