Preparedness Emerges as the Strongest Predictor of Personal Disaster Resilience

When an earthquake strikes, a flood surges, or a wildfire races through a hillside, the difference between chaos and a manageable emergency often comes down to what people did long before the sirens sounded. A new study published in Current Psychology offers some of the clearest statistical evidence yet that individual preparedness and personal disaster resilience are deeply intertwined, and that the bond between them is far stronger than many public health planners have assumed. Drawing on data from 434 adults in the Turkish city of Kayseri, researchers report a strikingly high positive correlation between how prepared people say they are and how resilient they rate themselves when disaster looms, a finding with immediate implications for how governments and communities design risk reduction programs.

The research team, led by Selma Durmuş Sarıkahya of Artvin Çoruh University together with colleagues from Artvin Çoruh University and Trabzon University, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: can individuals prevail against disasters, and if so, what personal characteristics tip the odds in their favor? Turkey provides a sobering backdrop for such an inquiry. The country sits atop active fault lines and endured the devastating Kahramanmaraş earthquakes of February 2023, events that killed tens of thousands and exposed gaps in both institutional response and household readiness. Against that backdrop, understanding the psychology of preparedness is not an academic luxury but a matter of survival.

Methodologically, the study employed a relational screening model with a cross-sectional design. Between February and April 2025, the researchers recruited 434 individuals aged 18 and over who visited a Family Health Center in central Kayseri. Participants completed a personal information form along with two validated psychometric instruments: the Disaster Preparedness Scale, which measures concrete readiness behaviors such as emergency planning and supply stocking, and the Individual Disaster Resilience Scale, which captures a person’s perceived capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from catastrophic events. Ethical approval was obtained from the Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee of Artvin Çoruh University, and the study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent from all participants.

The statistical analysis, performed in SPSS version 24.0, was thorough and multi-layered. The team ran descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, independent samples t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, and hierarchical multiple linear regression. The headline result is hard to overstate: disaster preparedness and individual disaster resilience showed a high-level, positive, and statistically significant correlation, with a Pearson coefficient of r = .857 at p < .001. In psychological research, where correlations above .50 are often considered strong, a coefficient approaching .86 is exceptional. It suggests that preparedness and resilience are not merely related constructs but may function as two faces of the same underlying capacity to anticipate and absorb catastrophic disruption.

Correlation alone, however, does not tell the whole story, and the researchers were careful to probe which demographic and experiential factors shaped the relationship. Three variables stood out. Individuals who had direct previous earthquake experience demonstrated significantly higher levels of disaster resilience than those who had never lived through one. Those who volunteered in disaster-related organizations also scored markedly higher, as did participants who reported regular access to disaster-related information. Each of these factors, the findings suggest, builds a kind of psychological infrastructure: lived experience teaches people what disasters actually feel like, volunteering embeds them in networks of mutual aid, and steady information flow keeps risk salient rather than abstract.

These results align closely with established theory in disaster psychology. Protection Motivation Theory, first articulated by Ronald Rogers in 1975, holds that people take protective action when they perceive a threat as severe and probable and believe they can effectively respond to it. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, and its later application to posttraumatic recovery by Charles Benight and Bandura, similarly argues that confidence in one’s own coping abilities is a central engine of resilience. The Kayseri data provide field evidence for these frameworks: preparedness behaviors appear to function as repeated acts of self-efficacy, each emergency kit assembled and each family evacuation plan rehearsed reinforcing the belief that one can survive and recover.

The study also resonates with a broader international literature on disaster vulnerability and adaptation. Previous research has linked educational attainment to resilience after natural hazards in the Caribbean, documented long-term effects of earthquake exposure on healthcare workers’ resilience in China following the Wenchuan earthquake, and shown that community resilience and household preparedness travel together in flood-prone regions of the United States. Related work by some of the same Turkish authors found that disaster preparedness literacy boosts individual disaster resilience, and that the personality traits of prospective disaster risk managers shape their capacity to cope. The new study extends this evidence base by quantifying the preparedness-resilience link in a general adult population using validated scales rather than proxies.

What makes the findings actionable is the demographic texture behind them. Because individuals without prior disaster experience showed lower resilience, the authors argue that awareness campaigns should be targeted specifically at people who have never faced a catastrophe, rather than assuming that fear of future events will motivate everyone equally. Experience, in other words, is a powerful but unequal teacher: those who have it are psychologically fortified, while those who lack it may underestimate both the likelihood and the consequences of disaster. The researchers recommend developing person-centered disaster preparedness programs, tailored to individual circumstances, and disseminating strategies that raise disaster awareness broadly, particularly among the disaster-inexperienced.

Volunteering emerges from the data as an especially intriguing lever. People who gave their time to disaster-related organizations scored higher on resilience, consistent with studies showing that volunteerism strengthens community resilience in disaster management and that volunteers themselves derive psychological benefits, including a sense of purpose, competence, and social connection. This suggests a practical policy pathway: recruiting ordinary citizens into disaster volunteer corps could simultaneously expand response capacity and cultivate a more resilient population. Similarly, ensuring regular public access to reliable disaster information, whether through official channels, media, or social platforms, appears to keep preparedness behaviors active rather than allowing them to decay between crises.

The study’s limitations are worth noting, as the authors themselves acknowledge in framing the work. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so it cannot definitively establish that preparedness causes resilience rather than the reverse, and the sample was drawn from visitors to a single Family Health Center in one Turkish city, which may limit generalizability. Still, the sheer strength of the correlation, combined with the consistency of the experiential predictors, gives the findings considerable weight. As climate change intensifies floods, wildfires, and storms worldwide, and as seismic risk persists in tectonically active nations, the message from Kayseri is clear: resilience is not a fixed trait bestowed by luck or temperament. It is built, behavior by behavior, by people who prepare, and societies that make preparation easy, informed, and communal may find that their citizens can indeed prevail against disasters.

Subject of Research: The relationship between individual disaster preparedness and personal disaster resilience among adults in Turkey

Article Title: Can we prevail against disasters? A relational assessment of preparedness and disaster

Article References: Durmuş Sarıkahya, S., Torpuş, K., Sarıoğlu Kemer, A., & Çınar Özbay, S. (2026). Can we prevail against disasters? A relational assessment of preparedness and disaster. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1550. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10099-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10099-4

Keywords: disaster preparedness, disaster resilience, earthquake experience, volunteering, protection motivation theory, self-efficacy, public health, risk reduction, Turkey, psychology, cross-sectional study, disaster awareness