Survey Instrument for Modeling Household Decision-Making for Structural Retrofit Processes

The purpose of this survey is to capture how homeowners move through the different stages of decision-making defined by the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) to install FORTIFIED Roofs on their homes through the Strengthen Your Roof Grant Program administered by the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association (NCIUA). The survey also collects information on the sociodemographic characteristics of the homeowner and the household as well as homeowner perceptions of hurricanes, the grant incentive program, and the retrofit itself. The unique contribution of this work is in breaking down homeowner retrofit decisions into stages in an effort to understand not only the total duration of the decision to retrofit (measured from the time the homeowner is unaware of the grant program until the retrofit is completed), but also how long they spend in each stage and what factors encourage homeowners to move from one stage to the next. The goal of this work is to identify where along the process homeowners get stuck and the factors that influence homeowners moving through the process to design targeted interventions that can improve homeowner participation in future programs. The survey can be reused as a starting point by other researchers looking to use PAPM or another stage-based theoretical framework to model homeowner decision-making related to structural retrofits.