Japanese Psychological Researct,1983

, Vol.25, No.2, 103-111

Causal analysis of earthquake concern and preparing

behavior in the North Izu Peninsula

HIROTADA HIROSE
Departmentof Psychology,Collegeof Arts and Sciences,Tokyo Woman'sChristian Unioersily,Suginami-ku,
Tokyo167

TOMOICHI ISHIZUKA
Japanese National Railways Labor ScienceResearch Institute, Kokubunji-shi, Tokyo 185

Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan is now threatened by danger of a major earthquake. This

paper attempts to assess the nature and magnitude of the impact of a completely new phe-
nomenon: The effect on people living in a broad region, caused by scientific information given
to them, predicting a forthcoming disaster. A three-wave panel survey was conducted over a
period of one year and three months to assess the effects of the disaster prediction upon the in-
habitants of two large hot-spring tourist areas: Atami and Ito in the North Izu Peninsula.
Among the results, which were derived by covariance structure analysis and other analyses, it
was found that earthquake danger cognition and anxiety of the inhabitants at a given point in
time affected their preparing behavior only at the same time point, but had no time-lagged
effect on their preparing behavior at the next point in time.

Key words: earthquake, panel survey, covariance structure analysis, preparing behavior,
earthquake anxiety, cognition of earthquake danger.

At a meeting of the Earthquake
Warning Council' in August 1976, a
seismologist announced that there was
imminent danger of a major earthquake
centered on Suruga Bay in Shizuoka
Prefecture in Japan, which was widely
reported in the mass media and caused
extensive anxiety. In October of the same
year, his announcement was generally con-
firmed in testimony given before the
Standing Committee on the Budget in
the Diet by a professor (Rikitake, 1979).
In the worst-case scenario, the focus of
the earthquake, which is expected to have
a magnitude of 8.0 or more on the Richter
scale, could include such densely pop-
ulated areas as the cities of Numazu,
Shimizu, and Shizuoka, with the sprawling
Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolis less than
150 kilometers away. Now referred to
1 A liaison committee of the Geographical
Institute authorized by the national
conduct and publish observations
tivity.
as the " Tokai earthquake " after the
name of the region around Shizuoka
Prefecture, it will cause damage over
an extremely wide area inland from
Suruga Bay and is expected to occur in
the midterm or long-term future.
News about the medium- to long-term
predictions of the Tokai earthquakes has
been widely disseminated by television,
newspapers, and other mass media. The
threat of an earthquake by far the largest
in personal history has stimulated popular
anxieties and urged the people toward
advance preparations.
Panel Survey
Given this background, the authors
conducted a three-wave panel survey of
earthquake concern and preparing be-
havior among the people of two major
Survey tourist centers (Atami City and Ito City)
government to
in Shizuoka Prefecture, where the scien-
of seismic ac- tific prediction of the Tokai earthquake
had seemed to damage on tourist enter-
104 H. Hirose
prises. The survey was carried out on
people who had been selected randomly
from town registers. The first and third
waves were carried out by having inter-
viewers contact the sample, and the second
wave was a mail survey. For the first
wave, 1 300 men and women between the
ages of 20 and 69 were chosen. Interviews
were carried out in August 1980. Out of
the 1 300 subjects, interviews were com-
pleted with 1 018 (78.3% completion
rate). The second wave questionnaires
were sent to the 1 018 people who had
answered all of the first-wave survey ques-
tions, and replies were received from 668
of them (65.6%) in February 1981.
Finally, the third wave was carried out in
October 1981, interviewing the same 1 018
that had answered the first wave. This
time the completion rate was 81.2% (827
respondents). The number who replied
in all three waves totalled 576.
Analysis of Earthquake Concern
and Preparing Behavior
H)patheses
Developments in geophysics and seis-
mology have made it possible to predict
the location, magnitude, and so forth of
major earthquakes with fair accuracy
(Weisbecker, Stoneman, Ackerman,
Arnold, Halton, Ivy, Kauty, Kroll,
Levy, Mickley, Miller, Rainey, & Zandt,
1977; Rikitake, 1976; Mogi, 1981). We
have been presented with a new phenom-
enon: the social, ecomomic, psycho-
logical impact of information about a pre-
dicted natural disaster on the area of
predicted damage.
Information (scientific prediction) about
an objective event like an earthquake con-
fronts people with a kind of perceived
situation. In a process that has been
described as " cognitive appraisal"
(Lazarus, 1966), people attempt to assess
the degree of certainty of the danger.
This cognitive process is reported to raise
anxiety and stress (McGrath, 1982).
and T. Ishizuka
The person seeks some behavior that will
modify this situation, and there ensues a
decision-making process, which is followed
by enactment of the selected behavior
(McGrath, 1982). Next, the enacted be-
havior is evaluated to see if it has suc-
ceeded in mitigating the danger of the
situation. If it has, vulnerability to the
threat is reduced and the intensity of
anxiety and stress should subside (Krohne
& Rogner, 1982).
The mixture of different types of indi-
viduals may complicate the phenomenon,
however we can make certain predictions
by restricting ourselves to the three factors
of earthquake anxiety, and preparing be-
havior and restricting the period of study
to the relatively short period of fifteen
months. Our working hypotheses are given
next,
Hypothesis 1: Despite fluctuations
among individuals, the two factors of
earthquake anxiety and danger cognition
should be consistent and stable over time.
Hypothesis 2: Attitude toward earth-
quake, which is composed by cognition
of earthquake danger and earthquake
anxiety, should have a positive, causal
effect on earthquake preparing behavior.
Hypothesis 3: Besides a contemporary
and causal effect on preparing behavior
(in cross section), attitude toward earth-
quake should have a lagged causal in-
fluence on preparedness behavior at the
next observed time.
Data
The levels of earthquake preparing
behavior, earthquake anxiety, and cogni-
tion of earthquake danger are the variables
in the three different waves of the survey.
The way in which questions were asked
and answered for each of the three vari-
ables was as follows.
Preparing behavior. Subjects were pres-
ented with the question, " Please tell me
if you have done any of those things to
prepare for a future earthquake ? " with
following alternatives to select from (mul-
 Causal analysis
Variable
Variance-covariance
tiple answers allowed).
1. Fasten down breakables and furniture
2. Have an emergency kit ready 3. Keep
a bucket or tub filled with water 4. Keep
a fire extinguisher 5. Keep medicine and
protective headgear 6. Keep food and
drinking water 7. Have earthquake insur-
ance 8. Reinforce house or fence con-
structions 9. Decide on evacuation routes
10. Decide on emergency communication
methods within the family 11. Participate
in community earthquake drills 12. Stay
away from dangerous places or dangerous
vehicles 13. Not undertake new building
14. Keep extra cash on hand 15. Others.
One point was allotted for each answer,
and one additional point was added to
the individual's total for an affirmative
answer to the question, " Have you par-
ticipated in your community's disaster
prevention organization? " Accordingly,
it was possible to rate each individual on
a scale running from a minimum of0 point
to a maximum 16 points.
Earthquake anxiety. Replies to the ques-
of attitude toward an earthquake 105
Table I
list and their notation
Table 2
matrix and means
tion, " Do you feel anxiety over the pros-
pect that the north Izu Peninsula may
have a major earthquake in the near
future ? " were given 1 point for the reply
" Little anxiety
," 2 for " Some anxiety,"
3 for " Considerable anxiety," and 4 for
" Extreme anxiety ."
Cognitionof earthquakedanger. Replies to
the question, " Tell me how much danger
the earthquake is supposed to bring "
were given 1 point for the reply " Little,"
2 for " Some," and 3 for " Considerable."
Table I gives the variables and notation
used in the analysis. Since there were
three waves and three variables in each
wave, a total of nine variables were an-
alyzed.
Results
Table 2 gives the means, variances, and
covariances of the nine variables. A com-
parison of the means using a two-tailed
t-test shows that Y1<Y2 (p<0.05)<Y3
(p<0.001). The average level of preparing
behavior thus increased over time, indi-
 106 H. Hirose and T. Ishizuka

Table 3 the assumption of constant reliability

Stability of earthquake
between waves
Table 4 quake anxiety was fairly stable.
Stability of cognition
danger between
cating the gradual implementation of
action to copc with the earthquake threat.
For earthquake anxiety, however, we find
that X1=X2 (no significance) but that
X2> X3 (p<0.05), showing almost the same
level of anxiety between Tl and T fol-
lowed by a decline between T2 and T3.
Cognition of earthquake danger is XQ<X5
(p<0.001) but X5>X6 (p<0.01). Thus
while cognition of earthquake danger and
earthquake anxiety declined after T2, pre-
paring behavior increased steadily from Tl
through T3.
The second column of Table 3 shows the
results of correction for attenuation under
anxicty
(Heise, 1969). The correlation between
each pair of variables is now higher than
the Pearson correlation, and the stability
of earthquake anxiety over the three
points in time is clear. The third column
of Table 3 shows the corrected correlations
under the assumption of constant error
variance (Wiley & Wiley, 1970). Once
again, the figures demonstrate that earth-
of earthquake Table 4 shows the Pearson correlations,
waves the Heise corrected correlations, and the
Wiley and Wiley corrected correlations for
cognition of earthquake danger at the
three occasions. As with earthquake anx-
iety, the corrected correlations are pretty
high, indicating a stability in cognition
of earthquake danger over time. From
these results, we regard hypothesis 1 can
not be rejected.
Preparing behavior at a given time, can
be thought of as an additive function in
which the state at any time is created by
adding to (or subtracting from) the pre-
vious state. All three types of variables-
cognition of earthquake danger, earth-
quake anxiety, and preparing behavior-
would thus appear to be strongly influ-
enced by their past states. For the sake
of simplicity, we shall assume that the state
at a given time is directly influenced only
by the state at the immediately preceding
time.
Figure la presents a covariance struc-
ture model without lag, and Fig. lb one

Fig. 1 a. A three-wave-three-variable covariance structure model with no lag effect

Fig. 1 b. A three-wave-three-variable covariance structure model with lag effect .
 Causal analysis of attitude toward an earthquake 107

with lag. As can lie seen from both These relations can be described in
figures, to the model in Fig. la, the model terms of matrix equation as follows:
in Fig. lb adds paths by which attitude
X=Δxξ+δ (1)
toward earthquake at time T, influences

earthquake behavior at time Ti+1.

Y=Δyη+ε (2)
These models are explained as follows. Bη=Tξ+ζ (3)
X, and Yi are the observed variables listed Aξ=ρ (4)
in Table 1, while n; and e, are unobserved

variables; 72; is the true score of Y; and ei

From equation (3),
is a concept measured by two indicators,
η=B-1Tξ+B-1ζ (5)
X; and X;+3 (1=1, 2, 3). That is, 72, re-
and from equation (4),
presents the observed level of preparing
behavior Y, with the effects of measure- ξ=A-1ρ (6)
ment error E, removed, and e, represents
Substituting equation (6) into equation
a sort of attitude towards earthquakes, as

measured by two indicators, earthquake

(5),
anxiety (Xi) and danger cognition (X;+3). (7)
The measurements are attended by meas-
substituting equation (6) into equation (1),
urement errors of and d;+9. The degree

of influence of e, on X, is given by Ai and X=ΔxA-1ρ+δ

its influence on X;+3 by d;+3. The attitu-
and substituting equation (7) into equa-
dinal indicators X; and Xi+3 differ from
tion (2),
the responses concerning actual behavior

(Yi) in that it seems reasonable to assume

that their measurement errors are serially
We now have:
correlated. For the other parameters, Ci

and p; are random shocks applied to 77,

and i; a; and ƒÀi represent the degree

of influence of e, and 72, on Ei+1 and 72i+1;

and r, indicate the causal effect of e, on 77,

and )7i./.

The variance-covariance matrix can thus be expressed as follows:

where

Following McDonald (1978, 1980), we decompose the variance-covariance matrix as

108 H. Hirose
shown below:
where
When the parameters in equation (8)
are estimated by the maximum-likelihood
method (McDonald, 1978, 1980) for the
models in Figs. 1a and 1b, the results are
shown in the first two columns of Table 5.
The parameters At, 22, and 23are scaled
to unity to standardize the estimates.
The data are the 45 variance and covari-
ance values listed in Table 2. For Fig. la,
the model without lag, there are 29 para-
meters to be estimated. Since there are
45 equations, there arc 16 degrees of free-
dom. For Fig. lb, the lagged model,
there are 31 parameters to be estimated,
so there are 14 degrees of freedom. Both
models show a poor fit to the data, with
chi-square values signifiicant at the 1%
level.
Could the bad fit be due to bias in the
parameter estimates caused by lumping
different structures together? It will be
appropriate to suppose that the T1-T2
and T2- T3 sections of the models might be
structurally dissimilar despite the stability
of each variable. Let us, therefore, divide
the three-wave model into two two-wave
models. Figures 2a and 2b show models
for the Tl-T2 section without and with
lag. If the maximum-likelihood method is
used to estimate the parameters in these
models, the results given in the third and
the fourth columns of Table 5 are ob-
tained.
Both models now show good fits to the
data. The no-lag model shows the better
and T. Ishizuka
(8)
I= identity matrix
fit, being not significant at even the 25%
level. The lag model is significant at the
25% level, but not at the 10% level. The
lag model is constructed of the no-lag
model with the parameter r2 added, so
the contribution of this parameter can be
found by subtracting the chi-square value
of the lag model from the chi-square of
the no-lag model and applying the chi-
square test for one degree of freedom.
Since the difference between the two
chi-square values is zero, the contributions
of 7.2 is zero. The no-lag model is thus
better for the panel data at Tl and T2.
Figure 3 shows models without lag
(Fig. 3a) and with lag (Fig. 3b) for the
Tr T, section, and the fifth and sixth
columns of Table 5 give the results of
maximum-likelihood estimation of their
parameters. The chi-square test shows
Fig. 2 a. A two-wave-three-variable covariance
structure model with no lag effect (T2-73).
Fig. 2 b. A two-wave-three-variable covariance
structure model with lag effect (T,-T,).
 Causal analysis of attitude toward an earthquake 109

Table 5
Maximum-likelihood estimates for the models in Figs. Ia, lb, 2a, 2b, 3a and 3b

The values within parentheses are fixed by scaling.

that neither model is significant at the the parameter 74 of lag effect.

10% level, indicating that both models To test the contribution of the lag effect
t the data considerably well. Thefi lag statistically, we again subtract the chi-
model consists of the no-lag model plus square value of the lag model from that
 110 H. Hirose
of the no-lag model and apply the chi -
square test for one degree of freedom .
Once more, the difference between the
two chi-square values is zero , so the con-
tribution of the lag effect 14 is clearly not
significant. This result enables us to con-
clude that the no-lag model is more ap-
propriate.
We are thus left with two surviving
models, those of Figs. 2a and 3a , corre-
sponding to columns 3 and 5 in Table 5.
These models will be used to examine
hypotheses 2 and 3.
Concerning hypothesis 2, the fairly large
positive values of rr and r3 indicate that
the earthquake attitude consisting of
earthquake danger cognition and earth-
quake anxiety has a positive effect on
preparing behavior. On the other hand,
is has a small negative value, very close
to zero. This implies that, although
attitude toward earthquake accelerate
the preparing behavior, the attitude loses
its function to motivate preparing behavior
after an individual's preparations have
advanced to a certain degree. Hypothesis
2, accordingly, is appropriate only before
preparing behavior has been enacted, and
becomes inappropriate, once it is ex-
ecuted.
Hypothesis 3 must be rejected, since the
contributions of the lag-effect parameters
are all statistically insignificant. What has
been confirmed is the opposite hypothesis
that attitude toward earthquake has no
Fig. 3 a. A two-wave-three-variable covariance
structure model with no lag effect (T2-T5) .
Fig. 3 b. A two-wave-three-variable covariance
structure model with lag effect (T2-T3).
and T. Ishizuka
lagged effect on earthquake-adaptive be-
havior.
Discussion
Never before in human history have
such broad regional societies been so seri-
ously affected by disaster prediction in-
formation. The first full-scale empirical
social scientific investigation of the social
impact of information stemming from a
major earthquake prediction was made by
Turner, Nigg, Paz, and Young (1980),
whose survey dealt with the predicted
Southern California earthquake.
Meanwhile, similar events were taking
place across the Pacific in Japan, where
national and local governments began
planning and implementing measures in
preparation for a major earthquake (the
Tokai earthquake) expected to occur in
the near future.
The first result of the analysis was that
over the 15-month period of three-wave
survey, levels of individual cognition of
earthquake danger and earthquake anx-
iety showed a sort of stability. The rela-
tive stability of these factors provides some
basis for concluding that there is very
little chance that the sense of impending
earthquake danger might suddenly flare
up and ignite panic.
A second finding is that, while cognition
of earthquake danger and earthquake
anxiety are capable of motivating earth-
quake adaptive behavior before earth-
quake preparations have been enacted,
they lose this function after the adaptive
behavior has been reached to a certain
degree. The mean values show that cog-
nition of danger and level of anxiety drop
as adaptive behavior progresses.
Finally, it has become clear that cog-
nition of earthquake danger and earth-
quake anxiety have a causal effect on adap-
tive behavior only in cross section, that
is, only at the same time point. They have
no time-lagged influence. This suggests
that cognition and anxiety cannot build
 Causal analysis of attitude
up as cumulative drive motivations, and
hence behavior will not lead to any abrupt
snowballing of adaptive behavior.
It may be argued that the presence or
absence of a lagged effect depends strongly
on the time interval between waves.
Perhaps an apparent lagged effect would
be found if a panel survey were conducted
using a shorter time interval, but the re-
sults in that case would be distorted by
various measurement errors, which the
first survey would induce in the second.
The most serious danger is that respon-
dents might remember the answers they
gave in the first survey and base their
answers to the second survey on them.
If there were many such respondents, a
time-lag effect would appear, but it would
actually be an artifact of defective survey
technique. Sufficient interval must be
left for previous answers to be forgotten,
a point that was taken into account in
the panel survey of this study.
Thus the fear expressed by adminis-
trative, disaster relief, and mass media
officials that the long or midterm predic-
tion of a major earthquake could throw
the region into a state of disruption turns
out to be nothing more than a kind of
" panic myth" (Quarantelli & Dynes ,
1971).
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(Received Feb. 21, 1983; accepted
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