Department of Communication, University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020, USA.
Anxiety Stress Coping. 2012 May;25(3):329-47. doi: 10.1080/10615806.2011.603048. Epub 2011 Aug 1.
Feelings of uncertainty are a central feature of the disaster experience. Surprisingly, though, there is very little systematic quantitative research about the impact of uncertainty on disaster survivors. Moreover, communal coping has increasingly received attention as a potential buffer of the negative effects of stressors but that literature is also limited in its application to disasters. This investigation applies research in the domain of uncertainty, together with the Theoretical Model of Communal Coping to better understand the experience of a community exposed to three wildfires in a one year period. A random-digit dialing procedure was used to gather data from 402 individuals. Participants completed measures of mental health, uncertainty, and communal coping in the context of their experience with the most personally stressful of the three wildfires. All analyses were examined separately for those who were evacuated and those who were not. Results support the negative impact of uncertainty across both evacuated and nonevacuated sub-samples and show a strong buffering role for communal coping among those who evacuated. The implications of these findings for the understanding of wildfire survivors' experiences are noted and future directions are proposed.
不确定性是灾难经历的一个核心特征。然而，令人惊讶的是，几乎没有系统的定量研究来探讨不确定性对灾难幸存者的影响。此外，社区应对作为压力源负面影响的潜在缓冲器，越来越受到关注，但该文献在应用于灾难方面也有限制。本研究将不确定性领域的研究与社区应对理论模型相结合，以更好地理解一个社区在一年内经历三次野火的经历。采用随机数字拨号程序从 402 个人中收集数据。参与者在与三次野火中最个人压力相关的背景下完成心理健康、不确定性和社区应对的测量。对于那些撤离和没有撤离的人，分别对所有分析进行了检查。结果支持不确定性对撤离和未撤离子样本的负面影响，并表明在撤离者中社区应对具有很强的缓冲作用。注意到这些发现对理解野火幸存者经历的意义，并提出了未来的方向。
