Educating children about bushfire risk and mitigation

Abstract

Bushfire risk perception: a developmental perspective - Briony Towers and Douglas Paton School of Psychology, University of Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania 7250 Kevin Ronan School of Psychology & ociology, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Qld 4702 One outcome of inquiries in the 2003 Canberra bushfires was recognition of a need for greater community preparedness, with schools being identified as a resource for pursuing this objective. However, the effective use of this resource requires understanding how children construct bushfire risk. There are two significant issues in this context. The first relates to the fact that risk perception is socially constructed (Joffe, 2003). The second concerns the fact that children’s understanding of constructs that underpin taking preventive actions (e.g., causality, prevention) change with age (Paton & Brown, 1991). This poster describes a model of bushfire risk perception that integrates these perspectives.Traditionally, research on risk perception has been conducted within the cognitive paradigm and focused on explaining risk perception in terms of individual characteristics (e.g., deficits ininformation processing ((Kahneman, Slovic & versky, 1982). The limited explanatory power of this approach has been recognized (Sjoberg, 2000). Consistent with the cultural approach, Joff’s (2003) Social Representation Theory (SRT) proposes that risk perceptions evolve through social interaction. Joffe’s approach complements socio-cultural theories of development that argue that the skills and knowledge of the culture are internalized through social interaction (Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978). Taken together, the SRT of Risk and socio-cultural theories ofdevelopmental provide a framework within which to examine children’s construction of bushfire risk. This poster discusses this through the integration of three perspectives (school, family,peer group), selected because they are implicated in children’s conceptual development in diverse knowledge domains (Case, 1992). Because the relative influence of each element of social context changes as children move fromearly childhood through to adolescence (e.g., in early adolescence, an increase in the influence of the peer group is accompanied by a decrease in family influence), risk perception will change as children develop as they get older. A need for a developmental framework is also necessitated by developmental changes in the way in the quality of children’s understanding of the causation of events and preventability (Case, 1998; Paton & Brown, 1991). The utility of this approach has been consistently demonstrated in research on health-related risk communication (Paton & Brown, 1991; Shute & Paton, 1990) and road safety education (Tolmie et al, 2005),with research in both areas providing evidence that when risk communication is designed to accommodate cognitive capability and social context, children can develop more sophisticated understanding of risk, how risk can be managed, and are more likely to covert these beliefs into protective actions and attitudes. Drawing upon data collected from interviews in several at- risk communities in Tasmania, this poster discusses the role of the social context in the construction of bushfire risk at each developmental stage and identify the cognitive constraints on the construction of bushfire risk each developmental stage. The contribution of these data to the development of a comprehensive, theoretically robust, model explaining the construction of bushfire risk over the lifespan is discussed. This will provide agencies responsible for educating communities about bushfire risk and mitigation with an evidence-based framework that they can use to design more effective risk communication programs that accommodate and capitalise on existing social resources and cognitive capabilities