Measuring personal emergency preparedness: validation and application of the emergency preparedness checklist

Large-scale emergencies such as natural and human-made disasters (e.g., hurricanes, terrorist attacks) have profound, deleterious effects on human well-being, including loss of life, physical injury, psychological trauma, and financial devastation. Personal or household emergency preparedness may mitigate the impact of these disasters. Effective and psychometrically sound measures of preparedness are critical to identifying individual differences in these behaviors and testing theories of emergency preparedness. However, there are few personal preparedness measures appropriate for all disaster types, and fewer still with evidence of reliability and validity. This paper describes the development and psychometric validation of an Emergency Preparedness Checklist (EPC), using three separate samples -- university undergraduates, adults living in the DC Metro Area, and a nationwide sample of adults with physical disabilities ? to demonstrate its potential generalizability. Across samples, the EPC had high levels of internal consistency and demonstrated concurrent validity. In addition, research with the EPC has shown that it is related to other constructs (e.g., perception of disaster threat, self-efficacy for emergency preparedness) as expected based on disaster theories. These findings support the EPC?s utility in research on disasters and preparedness.