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When the desert floods: Military relief work, attributing clean-up responsibility, and future helping intentions following the Katherine flood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

Tracey Tann
Tracey Tann*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Northern Territory University, Darwin NT 0909
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Abstract

Attribution theory has seldom been applied to assess the impact of community disaster relief work on military personnel, despite a clear prediction from Actor-Observer theory that direct experience of the community's environment will increase helpers' motivation to help in future crises. In the wake of the Northern Territory's Katherine River Flood in January 1998, 31 Royal Australian Army relief workers and 21 army personnel not posted to relief work attributed responsibility for cleaning-up homes, shops and businesses in the recently flood-affected South Pacific communities of Katherine, Townsville, and the Cook Islands. Direct experience of disaster relief work was not associated with any systematic differences in dispositional or situational attributions, although the latter were generally linked to intention to help in future crises. Occasional rumours of negative critical incidents with the local community, although rare considering the magnitude of the relief effort, may have partly coloured the experience of seeing the tragedy first-hand, which would suggest a need to research the Negative Information Bias and the psychology of rumour in future disaster recovery projects.

Type
Short papers
Information
South Pacific Journal of Psychology , Volume 11 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Community Development in North Australia , 1999 , pp. 81 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © University of Papua New Guinea and the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Territory University, Australia 1999

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