Situational Awareness of Public Response for effective crisis management

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic, in which public response was and still is central to damage control, has demonstrated how significant psychological and social science insights are for crisis management. Currently, knowledge of public response is often not incorporated into situational reports and, therefore, cannot be sufficiently considered by crisis management teams. With the intent of supporting change, the project “Situational Awareness of Public Response”, conducted by the Division of Psychosocial Crisis Management within the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, is currently designing a framework for including public response knowledge in crisis management decision-making. The main focus of this paper is this project. A strategic objective is to integrate public response knowledge more strongly into governmental crisis management. On the basis of evidence-based assessments, the needs and demands of the population can be identified and coping capacities can be better supported by crisis management measures. Several BBK-funded research projects are affiliated to the aforementioned main project, with the objective of strengthening human-centric civil protection. In a test phase, the situational picture of public response was compiled every two weeks on the basis of data and findings from publicly available studies and made available to various stakeholders.