The predictors of earthquake preparedness in Tehran households

BACKGROUND: The high risk of an earthquake happening and the harmful consequences that it leaves, besides the unsuccessful policies for preparing the community for mitigation, suggested that social factors should be considered more in this regard. Social trust is an influencing factor that can have significant impact on people’s behavior. OBJECTIVE: To determine the relationship of the influencing factors on the preparedness of Tehran households against earthquake. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study with 369 participants (February to April 2017) involved through stratified random sampling from selected urban districts of Tehran. The Persian version of an ‘Intention to be prepared’ measurement tool and a standard checklist of earthquake preparedness behaviors were used. The tool was evaluated for internal consistency and test-retest reliability in a pilot study (Cronbach’s α =0.94 and Intra Class Correlation Coefficient =0.92). RESULTS: Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that social trust is the most important predictor for the preparedness mean of changes in Tehran (R(2)=0.109, p<0.001, β: 0.187 for the Preparedness behavior; R(2)=0.117, β: 0.298, p<0.001 for Intention to be prepared; and R(2)=0.142, β: 0.345, p<0.001 for the Perceived preparedness). CONCLUSION: The relationship between social trust and preparedness dimensions suggested that changing a social behavior is not possible through considering only individual characteristics of community members and not their social networks relations. The programs and policies which try to enhance the social trust in general, may be able to increase public preparedness against earthquakes in the future.