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WITHDRAWN Optimizing Earthquake Ground Motion Visualizations to Enhance Public Understanding and Preparedness

Description: 

WITHDRAWN Creating engaging and informative visualizations of earthquake ground motion can improve public understanding of seismic hazards, reduce anxiety, and enhance preparedness. Educating the public about earthquakes also increases the acceptance of scientific findings and helps to justify allotted research funding. In this social science study, we evaluate the effectiveness of user-centered computational earthquake ground motion visualizations, accompanied by voice-overs explaining key concepts. We survey the general public to assess how these visualizations can enhance the public's understanding of scientific facts and comprehension of seismic hazards and address common misconceptions about earthquakes, which prior studies have shown are problematic (e.g., Karjack et al., 2022).
We designed an online survey containing 25 questions and three animations that provide an avenue to pre-test the public's understanding of these products, evaluate at what point and through which channels these visualizations should be distributed following a notable earthquake, which design format is preferred, and to what extent the information conveyed is actually understood. We gather quantitative feedback from participants recruited via social media platforms (e.g., LinkedIn and BlueSky) and direct emails. We aim to obtain feedback from ~200 survey participants. In the questionnaire, the participants can share their opinions about the three visualizations, and survey questions are used to assess their understanding of the science concepts. Participants have the opportunity to provide socio-demographic information to help us assess potential correlations between demographics and survey results. Our overall goal is to evaluate what earthquake ground motion visualizations are the most useful, what aspects need improvement, and how to iteratively improve these visualizations to increase the public's understanding of seismic hazards and earthquake preparedness.

Session: Visualization and Sonification in Solid Earth Geosciences, What’s Next? - I

Type: Oral

Date: 4/17/2025

Presentation Time: 10:45 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Debi

Student Presenter: No

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