Cross Sectional vs. Longitudinal

Emergency Prepare...Longitudinal

Emergency preparedness is an important topic in civic planning both in the medical care industry and in community planning. Significant negative effects can occur when a department, institution, city or region fails to respond to an emergency in a manner that has the highest rate of success with regard to loss of life as well as loss of infrastructure and/or important public services. Due in large part to the fact that emergency preparedness is associated with immediate and what by many is seen as a singular event in a time and place much of the research regarding emergency preparedness has to do with immediate response and research is reflective of that. Cross-sectional research is often the result of such research and the research questions that ensue when one is dealing with emergency preparedness issues. This brief work will explore a question regarding emergency preparedness that would be better researched using a longitudinal methods approach.

A secondary but equally important way to approach research on the subject of emergency preparedness is to ask research questions that are more reflective of a longitudinal research method. The types of research questions associated with such longitudinal focuses could encompass immediate and long-term outcomes for those involved in an emergency and/or for the community affected. These types of research questions could include both long-term psychological or practical outcomes for those involved, as well as long-term infrastructural recovery, both of which have implications about the effectiveness of emergency response preparedness.

A great deal of outcomes research has been conducted in the last 10-15 years with regard to the lasting effects of massive emergency situations. This has been in large part associated with several large emergency/disasters that have occurred in the U.S. over the last 15 years. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and terrorist attacks like those which occurred September 11th and at the Oklahoma City bombing (Felton, 2004) (Reissman, 2004). The lessons learned by such research educate future first responders as well as those who respond to the social, emotional and physical after effects of massive disasters and events, i.e. once the first crisis has abated and the after effects are being dealt with.

The immediate response to crisis that include the potential for massive loss of life often revolve around the immediate and most effective way to save lives and can fail to shelter individuals from the disastrous long-term psychological effects of such a crisis. Though this is not a primary concern, i.e. trying to make sure people do not see, hear or endure any more than is absolutely necessary in a crisis, yet there are clearly ways that first responders can mitigate some long-term effects by acting in ways that are repeatable. Therefore the research question, associated with emergency response preparedness that would be proposed here to be better researched using a longitudinal research style is: How can first responders better mitigate long-term psychological effects on survivors with immediate actions during a crisis? The research could be conducted among survivors of major disasters and would follow the survivors over several months or years, to assess both the memory of the kinds of events and actions of responders that aided in their well being during the crisis and compares several categories of "successful" coping following a disaster. Such categories could be psychological, i.e. incidence of reported Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or Clinical depression but would also look at material recovery such as ability to relocate or return and find gainful employment, housing and reestablish community connections. Comparable groups might be those who had experienced the catastrophic event directly and had reported negative contact with emergency responders and those who report having positive contact with emergency responders.