Hurricane Risk Perceptions of U.S. Gulf Coast Residents in 2017

Although hurricane risk perceptions and risk communication have been widely studied, comparably little attention has been given to how coastal residents interpret messages about trends in hurricane risk. Along the U.S. Gulf Coast, paleo records show that intense, landfalling hurricanes have been much more frequent in the geologically recent past, and climate models and experts project that global climate change will likely bring a return to more frequent intense hurricane activity over the next century. To enable planning and preparedness, there is therefore an urgent need to effectively communicate these trends to Gulf Coast stakeholders. To meet this need, an online survey of Gulf Coast residents was conducted in December 2017. This survey considered how randomly assigned infographics showing past or future trends in intense hurricane frequency affect hurricane risk perceptions and frequency beliefs among Gulf Coast residents. The survey questions, codebook, IRB approval, and csv-formated dataset and R code used to analyze the effects of infographic format on risk perceptions and frequency beliefs are presented in this repository. The survey questions, data, and code for this project may be reused but attribution is required (see terms of Open Data Commons Attribution license).

This dataset was published to supplement the publication, "Effects of temporal framing and hazard experience on receptivity to hurricane risk messages: A survey of U.S. Gulf Coast residents" (see related work). The survey results provided in this dataset were filtered to match the variables considered in this study, and the provided R code works with the provided dataset to reproduce the results from the article. The survey included questions related to a broader set of topics (which were used for other research projects). Responses to questions related to these other topics were not provided in this dataset as they were not relevant to this study. The survey document itself shows all questions asked (including those not relevant to the study) to disclose the full context in which the study-relevant questions were asked.