This study,
which is being conducted under the National
Science Foundation’s
US/Japan “Common Agenda”
collaborative
research program on urban earthquake hazards,
focuses on
public and stakeholder views of the potential
consequences
of major earthquakes, their support for
loss-reduction
policies, and their attitudes with respect to
acceptable
levels of risk. The study site for this project is
Alameda County,
in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. In
1999, in the
first phase of the study, DRC conducted a mail
survey with
a representative sample of over 700 households
in Alameda
County/ Oakland, California. In the second phase
of the project,
eight focus group discussions were carried out
to obtain information
on the risks perceptions and seismic
policy views
of members of four East Bay stakeholder
groups: public
officials, community residents, business
owners, and
practicing engineers. DRC is collaborating on
this project
with investigators from the Center for Disaster
Reduction Systems
at Kyoto University’s Disaster
Prevention
Research Institute.
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