The Union RAP: Industry-Wide Research-Action Projects to Win Health and Safety Improvements

Unions are ripe to engage in community-based participatory research (CBPR). We briefly profile 3 United Steelworker CBPR projects aimed at uncovering often-undocumented, industry-wide health and safety conditions in which US industrial workers toil. The results are to be used to advocate improvements at workplace, industry, and national policy levels. We offer details of our CBPR approach (Research-Action Project [RAP]) that engages workers and others in all research stages. Elements of RAPs include strategically constructed teams with knowledge of the industry and health and safety and with skills in research, participatory facilitation, and training; reciprocal training on these knowledge and skill areas; iterative processes of large and small group work; use of technology; and facilitator-developed tools and intermediate products

Responses When the Earth Trembles: The Impact of Community Awareness Campaigns on Protective Behavior

With a social marketing perspective, this study explores community disaster preparedness, by considering appropriate sources of information about disaster severity, the ways community members process information, and how social marketing programs might improve people's ability to protect themselves against natural disasters. With a foundation in the persuasion knowledge model and a scenario-based approach, this research applies a latent moderated structural equation model to data collected in southern Spain. Consumers first develop persuasion knowledge about a social marketing campaign by performing a threat appraisal, then engage in information seeking, which drives persuasion coping, before activating protective behavior. Systematic processing attenuates the effect of response barriers on persuasion coping but strengthens the subsequent effects of persuasion coping on protective behavior. Social marketers should encourage consumers to engage with community programs and help revise public policy to enhance communities' capacities to react to seismic disasters. This article also suggests implications related to the uses of social media and the adoption of the European Union's advanced seismic code