Original articleWhen factors of risk perception are an obstacle to risk representation: Earthquakes in Southern FranceQuand les facteurs de perception d’un risque constituent un obstacle à la représentation de ce même risque: le risque sismique dans le sud de la France
Introduction
Certain areas of Metropolitan France are exposed to earthquake risk, not least of which is the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region. In 1909, for example, a 6.21 magnitude earthquake hit the small town of Lambesc, killing nearly 50 people, injuring hundreds more and leaving many homeless. Several villages were partially or completely destroyed, making it one of the most destructive earthquakes ever to hit Metropolitan France. Of course, compared to other countries and even some French islands (such as Martinique or Guadeloupe), seismic activity in Metropolitan France is moderate, but preparedness is no less essential in these areas given that earthquakes are unpredictable (Geller, Jackson, Kagan, & Mulargia, 1997). Even though low to moderate risks are less dangerous than high risks, they do bring about various psychosocial factors that can blur risk perception, hinder mitigation and hence increase vulnerability.
For example, low to moderate earthquake risk can translate as “no risk” in the eyes of the general public (McClure, Johnston, Henrich, Milfont, & Becker, 2015), meaning that the terms used objectively by experts are interpreted subjectively and negatively impact preparedness. Indeed, why would individuals prepare for a hazard if they doubt its very existence? Similarly, low impact tremors, far more common than destructive earthquakes in low to moderate seismic areas, can induce a false sense of security and convince at-risk populations that they are not in danger (Becker et al., 2013, Mileti and O’Brien, 1993). Moreover, perceptible, damaging earthquakes are rare, implying a lack of practice, which in turn hinders preparation (Beck, André-Povaud, Paule-Annick, Chardonnel, & Lutoff, 2012).
In light of these observations, we conducted a study to determine if the specificities of low to moderate seismic areas can influence the emergence of a social representation of earthquakes. After exploring available data on the perception of earthquakes in Southern France, particularly in relation to the indicators of a social representation of earthquakes, we conducted a structural study on the social representation of earthquakes in the PACA region.
Section snippets
Theory
In general, understanding and favouring hazard preparation necessarily implies exploring how the hazard in question is perceived (Slovic, 1987). Indeed, risk perception has been linked to preparation in several studies on numerous risks (e.g. McClure et al., 1999, Becker et al., 2013, Palm and Carroll, 1998 on earthquake risk; Bourque et al., 2012 on terrorism; Stein, Buzcu-Guven, Dueñas-Osorio, Subramanian, & Kahle, 2013 on hurricanes). Thus, beyond understanding how laypeople think about
Method
For this study, conducted in 2014 in the PACA region, we adopted the structural approach to social representations (Abric, 1993, Abric, 2001). Within this approach, a social representation is defined as an “organised set of information, opinions, attitudes and beliefs about a given object” (Abric, 2003, p. 59). Through his Central Core Theory, Abric, 1993, Abric, 2001 accounts for a representation's structure by defining two types of representational elements: central elements (that form the
Prototypical analysis
Before performing prototypical analysis on verbal associations, Flament and Rouquette (2003) recommend simultaneously considering diversity and rarity indexes as exploratory indicators of the existence of a structured social representation. The diversity index is obtained by dividing the number of different associations by the total number of associations. The rarity index is the percentage of hapaxes in the overall corpus (i.e., associations that only appear once). In our case, the diversity
Discussion
Our main aim was to determine if a social representation of earthquakes can emerge in regions where earthquake risk perception is low. We first considered data available on earthquake risk perception in the PACA region (Marchand et al., 2011, Lopez et al., 2015) in relation to criteria defined as conditioning the emergence of a social representation (Moliner, 1993, Flament and Rouquette, 2003). This led to ambivalent conclusions as some factors supported the existence of a social representation
Conclusion
Risk research through the scope of SRT is becoming more and more popular among researchers (Weiss et al., 2011). Recently, numerous studies on a diversity of risk-related topics have relied heavily on SRT to explore social thinking about risks (Baggio and Colliard, 2007, Baggio and Rouquette, 2006, Breakwell, 2001, Ernst-Vintila, 2009, Gruev-Vintila and Rouquette, 2007). To our knowledge, very few, if any of these studies has sought to verify beforehand that SRT is truly the most pertinent
Disclosure of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interest.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a doctoral grant from the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region (France) from 2011 to 2014.
The authors sincerely thank Elsa Causse and Serge Caparos (CHROME Lab, E.A. 7352, Nîmes University, France) for their feedback on the initial draft of this paper, and Grégory Lo Monaco (Laboratory of Social Psychology, E.A. 849, Aix-Marseille University, France) for his contribution to the theory.
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