↓ Skip to main content

Expanding protection motivation theory: investigating an application to animal owners and emergency responders in bushfire emergencies

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Psychology, April 2017
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (82nd percentile)
  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (72nd percentile)

Mentioned by

blogs
1 blog
twitter
4 X users
googleplus
1 Google+ user

Citations

dimensions_citation
96 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
376 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
Expanding protection motivation theory: investigating an application to animal owners and emergency responders in bushfire emergencies
Published in
BMC Psychology, April 2017
DOI 10.1186/s40359-017-0182-3
Pubmed ID
Authors

Rachel Westcott, Kevin Ronan, Hilary Bambrick, Melanie Taylor

Abstract

Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) was developed by Rogers in 1975, to describe how individuals are motivated to react in a self-protective way towards a perceived health threat. Rogers expected the use of PMT to diversify over time, which has proved true over four decades. The purpose of this paper is to explore how PMT can be used and expanded to inform and improve public safety strategies in natural hazards. As global climate change impacts on the Australian environment, natural hazards seem to be increasing in scale and frequency, and Emergency Services' public education campaigns have necessarily escalated to keep pace with perceived public threat. Of concern, is that the awareness-preparedness gap in residents' survival plans is narrowing disproportionately slowly compared to the magnitude of resources applied to rectify this trend. Practical applications of adaptable social theory could be used to help resolve this dilemma. PMT has been used to describe human behaviour in individuals, families, and the parent-child unit. It has been applied to floods in Europe and wildfire and earthquake in the United States. This paper seeks to determine if an application of PMT can be useful for achieving other-directed human protection across a novel demographic spectrum in natural hazards, specifically, animal owners and emergency responders in bushfire emergencies. These groups could benefit from such an approach: owners to build and fortify their response- and self-efficacy, and to help translate knowledge into safer behaviour, and responders to gain a better understanding of a diverse demographic with animal ownership as its common denominator, and with whom they will be likely to engage in contemporary natural hazard management. Mutual collaboration between these groups could lead to a synergy of reciprocated response efficacy, and safer, less traumatic outcomes. Emergency services' community education programs have made significant progress over the last decade, but public safety remains suboptimal while the magnitude of the awareness-preparedness gap persists. This paper examines an expanded, other-directed application of PMT to expand and enhance safer mitigation and response behaviour strategies for communities threatened by bushfire, which may ultimately help save human life.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 4 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 376 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 376 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 50 13%
Student > Ph. D. Student 48 13%
Student > Bachelor 39 10%
Researcher 25 7%
Student > Doctoral Student 18 5%
Other 55 15%
Unknown 141 38%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Social Sciences 37 10%
Business, Management and Accounting 32 9%
Environmental Science 26 7%
Psychology 23 6%
Computer Science 22 6%
Other 83 22%
Unknown 153 41%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 11. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 September 2017.
All research outputs
#2,937,013
of 23,881,329 outputs
Outputs from BMC Psychology
#194
of 866 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#53,505
of 311,808 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Psychology
#4
of 11 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,881,329 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 87th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 866 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.2. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 311,808 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 82% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 11 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its contemporaries.