Natural Hazards Research Summit 2024: Mitigation Household Decision-Making: An Application of the Precaution Adoption Process Model to the SYR Program

The residential sector accounts for the majority of expected annual economic losses from hurricane winds and flooding. Building codes and land use policies are effective ways to reduce future damage for new construction but existing homes typically must be voluntarily strengthened. Homeowners can play a critical role in increasing regional resilience and reducing damage and loss through their decisions to retrofit (i.e., physically strengthen) their homes; however, Javeline and Kijewski-Correa found that homeowners typically do not voluntarily strengthen their homes. Disaster mitigation incentive programs, such as the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association’s (NCIUA) Strengthen Your Roof (SYR) Program, attempt to motivate homeowners to implement structural mitigations by offering grants to upgrade their roofs to Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) approved FORTIFIED Roof standards. Previous studies that explored homeowners’ implementation of hurricane-related retrofits and the effectiveness of incentive programs only considered whether a homeowner retrofitted their home or not and did not consider the process – possibly unfolding over time – by which a homeowner arrived at that decision. Stock et al. examined household engagement in protective action from the lens of the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) theory. This study expands upon the work of Stock et al. by utilizing PAPM theory to break down a homeowner’s progression through the SYR grant program into a series of stages. This work presents a unique opportunity to collaborate with practitioners such as NCIUA who possess first-hand knowledge of increasing regional hurricane risk and the implications for the future of U.S. coastal communities. The partnership between the research team and NCIUA facilitates the development of a rich dataset that combines real-time institutional data from the SYR program with survey data, providing a multi-faceted view of homeowner mitigation decision-making behavior. This study contributes to the existing body of literature by offering a novel approach to modeling household mitigation decision-making as a process rather than an event that occurs at one point in time, and that thus better reflects how households make decisions to retrofit their homes and the various drivers that move them along the process. Furthermore, the insight gained from these models can be pivotal in shaping future mitigation programs and policy decisions to improve adoption rates of retrofit incentives in coastal communities facing heightened risk due to more frequent and severe storms in the future.