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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Media Framing And Policy Change After Columbine, Thomas Birkland, Regina Lawrence
Media Framing And Policy Change After Columbine, Thomas Birkland, Regina Lawrence
Thomas A Birkland
The 1999 Columbine school shooting incident in Colorado gained far more media attention across a broader range of issues than any school violence episode before or since. One might expect that Columbine would have had an influence on public opinion, public policy, and scholarship commensurate with the attention it gained. We find that the event did contribute in a limited but interesting way to scholarship on media framing. But the effect of Columbine on public opinion and the nature and substance of public policy was limited. Attention to school shootings peaked with Columbine, and the attention surrounding that event mostly …
Disasters, Catastrophes, And Policy Failure In The Homeland Security Era., Thomas Birkland
Disasters, Catastrophes, And Policy Failure In The Homeland Security Era., Thomas Birkland
Thomas A Birkland
The September 11 attacks triggered federal policy changes designed to influence emergency management in the United States, even though these attacks did not suggest a need for a wholesale restructuring of federal policy in emergency management. Instead, for several reasons, federal policy’s emphasis on terrorism and emergency management significantly degraded the nation’s ability to address natural disasters. The federal government sought to create a top-down, command and control model of emergency management that never fully accounted for, positively or normatively, the way local emergency management works in practice. The Obama administration will have to address the questions raised by the …
Disasters, Lessons Learned, And Fantasy Documents, Thomas Birkland
Disasters, Lessons Learned, And Fantasy Documents, Thomas Birkland
Thomas A Birkland
This article develops a general theory of why post-disaster ‘lessons learned’ documents are often ‘fantasy documents’. The article describes the political and organizational barriers to effective learning from disasters, and builds on general theory building on learning from extreme events to explain this phenomenon. Fantasy documents are not generally about the ‘real’ causes and solutions to disasters; rather, they are generated to prove that some authoritative actor has ‘done something’ about a disaster. Because it is difficult to test whether learning happened after an extreme event, these post-disaster documents are generally ignored after they are published.
Disaster Research And Social Network Analysis: Examples Of The Scientific Understanding Of Human Dynamics At The National Science Foundation, Larry Suter, Thomas Birkland, Raima Larter
Disaster Research And Social Network Analysis: Examples Of The Scientific Understanding Of Human Dynamics At The National Science Foundation, Larry Suter, Thomas Birkland, Raima Larter
Thomas A Birkland
How can knowledge about human behavior be accumulated effectively? How does the funding agency best assure that scientific research is effectively organized? This paper was stimulated by a meeting of nine researchers who received small grants from NSF to conduct empirical analysis of individuals affected by the hurricane disasters (Katrina and Rita) of 2005. Two of the authors are NSF program directors (one is a former director) who will discuss the philosophy and intentions of funding programs on social dynamics of disasters following the 2005 hurricanes. We discuss how NSF funding supported studies of these disasters and what was expected …