Measuring the effectiveness of disaster warning messages: A forum

We are initiating a conversation about what it means for an alert or warning message to be “effective.” How we define effectiveness affects the outcomes we measure and the methods we use to conduct our research. Decades of research have been conducted and demonstrate that certain types of message content, style, and structure motivate protective action decisions and help people manage their risk. How to measure warning message success, however, appears to be still unresolved. Recently, Carlson et al. (2024) stated that an “accepted doctrine” across a field of scholarship that includes the authors of this forum piece that they dub the “message optimization paradigm” is that the goal of an effective warning message is to generate immediate warning compliance. In our view and in the view of other preeminent warning scholars who study communication in the disaster context, warning compliance is a problematic outcome. Furthermore, measuring compliance based on one’s intention to comply is a meaningless metric for risk communication practitioners. Instead, we argue that warning messages are successful if they give people the information they need to make decisions. In this article, we will discuss the following: 1. What warning compliance is and why it’s problematic, 2. Why compliance intentions are not a meaningful measure for disaster risk communication, and 3. What we measure instead based on Mileti and Sorensen’s Warning Response Model (WRM).