On March 19, Myers participated in a one-day invitational workshop on Land Use Planning and Natural Hazard Mitigation sponsored by the Insurance Institute for Property Loss Reduction in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The meeting marked the first steps of the property casualty insurance industry to take a meaningful role in land use planning on a national basis. Natural Hazards in Print Mileti, Dennis S. and JoAnne DeRouen Darlington. 1997. The Role of Searching in Shaping Reactions to Earthquake Risk Information. This article assesses public response to an earthquake prediction for the San Francisco Bay Area on a sample of households from eight Bay Area counties.
Descriptive findings suggest that an earthquake culture exists in the study population.
The authors conclude that motives and social position matter little in determining social action and that more work is needed to determine how variations in new information create ambiguity which differentially fosters searching, the formation of alternative definitions, and subsequent action. This workshop inaugurated the Project for the Study of Post-Soviet Demographic Change. The project is envisioned as a response to the extraordinary changes which have emerged with the gradual collapse of the socialist world. These changes border on the catastrophic, and it is difficult to imagine economic recovery of the region without its coming to grips with the implied social problems underlying plummeting birth rates and soaring mortality and divorce rates. This is also a time of unprecedented information on the former Soviet Union.