Political Science professor to study social behavior of evacuees
Political Science Department Chair Rick Wilson will oversee 1,200 interviews of Hurricane Katrina evacuees over the next two months. His National Science Foundation-funded research will focus on evacuees’ experiences and cooperation strategies among those forced to live with strangers in a foreign setting.
Wilson, also a psychology and statistics professor, said the media has portrayed hurricane survivors as self-interested.
“What I want to understand is the extent to which cooperation remains among people even though they don’t have social and political support networks,” Wilson said. “How are people coping with other people like themselves where they’re all strangers to one another? … They’re going to look a lot more cooperative than they’ve been painted.”
Wilson said he will run the experiments with evacuees from small facilities, the George R. Brown Convention Center and the Astrodome.
The research will investigate whether the size of evacuees’ environments affects their willingness to cooperate, as well as how their responses change over time.
“You could expect people to get frustrated,” he said. “You might get a little pissed off after [staying in one shelter] for a month.”
Wilson will begin research this weekend by bringing groups of 20 people to social science behavioral research laboratories at Rice. Wilson said he will interview about 400 evacuees next week.
Research methods will include cooperation games, decision testing with money and short questionnaires. Evacuee subjects will be paid for their time. Wilson said he has hired five evacuees connected to Rice and several undergraduate and graduate students to help with the research.
Wilson said the idea and funding for the project developed at an American Political Science Association conference he attended last week.
“I ran into an old buddy from the National Science Foundation, and he suggested it’s imperative to get people in the field to study this,” Wilson said. “He said I was the only one who could do this quickly [because I’m in Houston].”
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