Community-based disaster communication: how does it become trustworthy?

Abstract

Purpose

Trust in disaster communication is significant because a lack of trust will prevent the transformation of information into usable knowledge for an effective disaster response. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the culture and network ties of an affected community can encourage trust and participation in disaster communication.

Design/methodology/approach

A qualitative case study of Jalin Merapi (JM) was conducted by interviewing 33 research participants in the Mt Merapi surroundings.

Findings

The findings indicate that culture-embedded disaster communication plays important roles in increasing the effectiveness of disaster information and encouraging trust in the authenticity of locally based disaster information at the individual level. The findings also identify that strong ties and weak ties play different roles in disaster communication. The strong ties are more effective in facilitating information diffusion and encourage trust and community participation within the affected community. Furthermore, the weak ties are more effective in disseminating information to wider audiences, and have an indirect influence in encouraging trust by extending the offline social network owned by the affected community.

Originality/value

Most literature on disaster communication focusses on the construction of disaster messages to encourage effective disaster response. Less attention has been paid to the information receivers regarding how disaster information is considered to be trustworthy by the affected community and how it can increase collective participation in community-based disaster communication.

Citation

Gultom, D.I. (2016), "Community-based disaster communication: how does it become trustworthy?", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 478-491. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-02-2016-0026