INTERPRETIVE STUDY OF APPRAISAL AND COPING OF RESCUE WORKERS IN AN EARTHQUAKE DISASTER: THE CYPRESS COLLAPSE (CALIFORNIA, LOMA PRIETA EARTHQUAKE).
Contributors: University of California, San Francisco.
Published: 1991
Number of pages: 332
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Psychology, Clinical.; Sociology, General.
Description: Research into the psychological responses of rescue workers is sparse and fairly polarized: some researchers believe rescuers are greatly affected by the stress of disaster; others believe the problem is not pervasive. This dissertation examined the effects of disaster rescue work, focusing on the perspective of rescuers at the collapse of the Interstate-880 Cypress street viaduct following October 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake. It explored the rescuers' motivations, actions, coping strategies, interactions, and understanding of and the responses to the event, as well as the practical wisdom each acquired. Most rescuers were potential earthquake victims as well as rescuers. Some were trained for emergencies and accustomed to trauma; others were neophytes.

The primary data collection techniques were participant observation, document analysis, and semistructured interviewing. Forty-two military pararescuers, firefighters, department of transportation workers, and coroner-investigators were interviewed six months after the event. Interpretive analysis from a phenomenological perspective uncovered both common and unique meanings shaping experience and influencing psychological outcomes.

Individuals described their experience in terms of life histories embedded in networks of relationships involving membership in a culture, community, job, and family. Their narratives reveal individual and shared concerns based on occupational roles, demands, and prior experience. Four distinct patterns of involvement were discovered: obligation to heroism, obligation to each other, obligation to the public, and obligation to the job. Paradigm cases and exemplars illustrate variations in experience as well as common themes, issues, and coping behaviors.

The data yielded two sets of meanings enabling rescuers to perform. One involved a shared cultural imperative first save life and then to recover and return bodies. This imperative formed the basis for involvement and a common goal. The other set of meanings involved occupational concerns dictating the specific nature of involvement and experience. Outcomes of experience revealed the rescuers' enduring ability to face and participate in a situation that challenged fundamental meanings and brought unexamined values and assumptions under scrutiny.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-09, Section: B, page: 4671.

Thesis (D.N.S.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1991.

School code: 0034.