Читать книгу Theorizing Crisis Communication - Timothy L. Sellnow - Страница 27

The PADM treats warnings as essentially informative and persuasive processes that lead to individual decisions and behavioral outcomes. Communication processes are essential to warning and subsequent decision processes and more effective communication (e.g., consistent, credible, specific, multiple channels) is more likely to produce decisions and behavioral outcomes (actions) appropriate to the threat.

Although PADM focuses on a more limited phenomenon than the Hear-Confirm-Understand-Decide-Respond model, it is very flexible and parsimonious and has been applied to a number of warning contexts, such as natural hazards, industrial risks, and terrorism (Kang et al., 2007; Lindell & Perry, 2000, 2003). The model does assume some level of decisional rationality and linearity. Receivers, although active in processing messages and making decisions about actions, are not framed primarily as dynamic in co-creating an understanding of risk. Risk awareness and understanding are located primarily outside the receiver. Thus, the model is a more interactional than transactional framework for communication and emphasizes sender- and message-related variables as opposed to receiver variables. Lindell and Perry (2011) note they ground their work in the classic source-channel-message-receiver-effect-feedback model. The associated research generated by the PADM has presented a relatively complex understanding of the communication processes and the variables associated with warnings and decisions about protective action. It has generated a great deal of research into the subprocesses of decisions about protective actions and, in general, the research has supported the model. Efforts have also been made to apply the model to a wide array of risk conditions, audiences, and message forms. Thus, the PADM has been shown to be flexible.

Although the PADM is primarily a descriptive model as opposed to prescriptive, its formulation does allow for translation and application to inform decision and management during a disaster or hazard situations. The eight questions Lindell and Perry identify, for example, can be used to inform the development of messages and information systems. The role of hazard intrusiveness and proximity in promoting hazard adoption might also inform risk communication campaigns. Although applications are, according to Lindell and Perry, in their early stages, the model shows promise.