Many recent developments in education theory and the field of disaster management have left the meaning of public education as applied in the disaster management field fraught with uncertainty. This thesis addresses this uncertainty via a phenomenographic research study that sheds light on the meaning of public education, despite such uncertainty, by revealing a discrete number of qualitatively different ways in which disaster managers and disaster educators experience and understand public education. Transcriptions of interviews of 25 such senior Australian disaster managers and educators were analysed using phenomenographic methods and revealed a set of discrete, parsimonious and qualitatively different ways of experiencing public education. The referential component of the different ways of experiencing was revealed within ten emergent categories of description for public education: (i) a non-effective process; (ii) a way of managing a public issue; (iii) promoting an issue; (iv) issuing expert instructions; (v) changing individuals; (vi) strategic teaching and training; (vii) collaborative partnerships; (viii) empowering learners to make informed decisions; (ix) negotiation; and (x) element in societal learning. The structural component of the emergent ways of experiencing public education was presented in the form of a phenomenographic outcome space. Linkages between these findings about public education and current literature were made. The results suggested multiple ways to improve public education within the disaster management community and more widely. The need for clarity in communication amongst educators and professionals in regard to public education was confirmed by the research findings. Insights into phenomenography and education were included within the discussion.

This study focuses on records management in support of service delivery in the public health sector of Limpopo Province, South Africa. The study sought to investigate whether the current records-keeping practices support or undermine service delivery and the e-health readiness level. Mixed methods were used for the survey. Questionnaires, observation and interviews were used to collect data. Purposive sampling method was used to identify interview participants and stratified random sampling for questionnaire participants. The total population of the study was 324 from which 210 participants were sampled. The response rate was 77% (162). The study discovered that records management negatively affected timely and effective health care services. This resulted in long patient waiting times and patients being treated without their medical history records. The study recommended the introduction of an electronic records management system capable of capturing and providing access to a full patient record and tracking paper record movement. / Information Science

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Doina Caragea / Twitter is one of the most active social media sites today. Almost everyone is using it, as it is a medium by which people stay in touch and inform others about events in their lives. Among many other types of events, people tweet about disaster events. Both man made and natural disasters, unfortunately, occur all the time. When these tragedies transpire, people tend to cope in their own ways. One of the most popular ways people convey their feelings towards disaster events is by offering or asking for support, providing valuable information about the disaster, and voicing their disapproval towards those who may be the cause. However, not all of the tweets posted during a disaster are guaranteed to be useful or informative to authorities nor to the general public. As the number of tweets that are posted during a disaster can reach the hundred thousands range, it is necessary to automatically distinguish tweets that provide useful information from those that don't. Manual annotation cannot scale up to the large number of tweets, as it takes significant time and effort, which makes it unsuitable for real-time disaster tweet annotation. Alternatively, supervised machine learning has been traditionally used to learn classifiers that can quickly annotate new unseen tweets. But supervised machine learning algorithms make use of labeled training data from the disaster of interest, which is presumably not available for a current target disaster. However, it is reasonable to assume that some amount of labeled data is available for a prior source disaster. Therefore, domain adaptation algorithms that make use of labeled data from a source disaster to learn classifiers for the target disaster provide a promising direction in the area of tweet classification for disaster management. In prior work, domain adaptation algorithms have been trained based on tweets represented as bag-of-words. In this research, I studied the effect of Part of Speech (POS) tag unigrams and bigrams on the performance of the domain adaptation classifiers. Specifically, I used POS tag unigram and bigram features in conjunction with a Naive Bayes Domain Adaptation algorithm to learn classifiers from source labeled data together with target unlabeled data, and subsequently used the resulting classifiers to classify target disaster tweets. The main research question addressed through this work was if the POS tags can help improve the performance of the classifiers learned from tweet bag-of-words representations only. Experimental results have shown that the POS tags can improve the performance of the classifiers learned from words only, but not always. Furthermore, the results of the experiments show that POS tag bigrams contain more information as compared to POS tag unigrams, as the classifiers learned from bigrams have better performance than those learned from unigrams.

As the Web evolves unexpectedly fast, information grows explosively. Useful resources become more and more difficult to find because of their dynamic and unstructured characteristics. A vertical search engine is designed and implemented towards a specific domain. Instead of processing the giant volume of miscellaneous information distributed in the Web, a vertical search engine targets at identifying relevant information in specific domains or topics and eventually provides users with up-to-date information, highly focused insights and actionable knowledge representation. As the mobile device gets more popular, the nature of the search is changing. So, acquiring information on a mobile device poses unique requirements on traditional search engines, which will potentially change every feature they used to have. To summarize, users are strongly expecting search engines that can satisfy their individual information needs, adapt their current situation, and present highly personalized search results. In my research, the next generation vertical search engine means to utilize and enrich existing domain information to close the loop of vertical search engine's system that mutually facilitate knowledge discovering, actionable information extraction, and user interests modeling and recommendation. I investigate three problems in which domain taxonomy plays an important role, including taxonomy generation using a vertical search engine, actionable information extraction based on domain taxonomy, and the use of ensemble taxonomy to catch user's interests. As the fundamental theory, ultra-metric, dendrogram, and hierarchical clustering are intensively discussed. Methods on taxonomy generation using my research on hierarchical clustering are developed. The related vertical search engine techniques are practically used in Disaster Management Domain. Especially, three disaster information management systems are developed and represented as real use cases of my research work.

Disaster vulnerability and health status are determined by the intersecting social identities individuals possess in a given context. Based on two months fieldwork in Bangladesh, this study employs a comparative exploratory case study methodology to understand the way in which the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Oxfam and Gonoshasthaya Kendra construct and deploy the concepts of gender, empowerment and women’s health within their disaster management policies and programs. It finds that disaster management interventions that fail to understand the intersectional nature of women’s vulnerability risk entrenching or creating forms of both privilege and oppression. Combining intersectionality, Moser’s Practical and Strategic Gender Needs and Sen’s Capability Approach, this study aims to deconstruct the embedded view of women in disaster management by suggesting that a social determinants of health approach, paired with intersectionality, could provide important insights into disaster management interventions and their effectiveness in addressing the gendered realities of women facing disasters.

Despite disaster managers’ best efforts, inter-organizational disaster management suffers from varying levels of success. One factor that is likely to account for these variations is team mutual understanding, also known as common ground. To validate the potential effect of common ground in disaster management, the thesis investigates common ground in several interviews with disaster managers and in an experimental study involving an inter-organizational disaster event scenario. Analysis of interviews revealed that disaster managers perceived gaps in understanding between responders, the importance of mutual understanding, and perceived common ground similarly to depictions in theory with a few exceptions. Analyses of the experimental study indicated that contextual factors of Team composition, Problem solving approach and Type of tasks differently impacted measures of performance and implicit coordination, and that implicit coordination partially mediated and supressed the relationship between contextual factors and decision quality. Findings suggest the variation in disaster managers’ performance can be ascribed to common ground, implicit coordination, and contextual factors. Moreover, results showed the satisfaction with outcome did not correlate with expert rated quality of decision; and that while satisfaction related to consensus and quality of the decision was linked to generating alternative ideas and debate. Collaboration proved to be more effective in public communication tasks, especially for homogenous team composition. The findings support initiatives for more cross-training and further lab and field experiments.

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The ambition of this thesis is to fulfill two aims. The first aim is theory development, by presenting a theoretical framework where climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) are combined. The second aim is empirical, where the theoretical framework is used to analyze an example of DRR with an ambition to include CCA. An integrated approach is beneficial for the achievement of sustainable development and for strengthening resilience to hazards (Schipper 2009; Mitchell et al 2010). However, the two fields largely operate in separate which can cause reversed development outcomes and hamper the overall objectives of both DRR and CCA. The ambition of this thesis is hence to investigate to what extent the approach is used within humanitarian aid organizations today, with a specific focus on the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). The method used is a qualitative content analysis of the “Integrated Flood Resilience Programme” in Bangladesh (IFRP) conducted by the IFRC. The main finding of the study suggests a surprising progress of including CCA and climate change as components within DRR. However, there are still core aspects of an integrated approach missing in the project. For instance, there is no inclusion of an environmental risk assessment or alignment with climate frameworks, except for parts of the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, the efforts associated with CCA are perceived unspecific in comparison to other parts of the project. This thesis therefore reaffirms some of the conclusions made by other scholars (e.g. Mitchell et al 2010; Schipper 2009: Thomalla et al 2006; Hammond 2017), implying that DRR and CCA still mostly operate separately.

This thesis examines how local knowledge is identified and implemented in disaster responseand recovery programmes conducted by international aid organizations. The case that isexamined in the analysis is the International Federation of Red Cross and Red CrescentSocieties response and recovery operations conducted in the aftermath of the Nepalearthquake 2015-2019. Using the method of content analysis, the final report of the Nepaloperation is analyzed using categorizations of local knowledge and informed by previousresearch on local knowledge in disaster operations, along with international aid organizations'engagement with local knowledge.The main findings of this study shows that the implementation of activities that utilize orseeks to identify local knowledge is heavily concentrated to the recovery phase of theoperation, with no activities informed by local knowledge found in the response phase. Allcategories of local knowledge are found throughout the operation, with socio-culturalknowledge being the most prominently utilized, whilst environmental knowledge andorganizational knowledge remains underrepresented. Activities that were not informed bylocal knowledge, or utilized local knowledge to some degree created unintendedconsequences, suggesting that for a productive utilization of local knowledge, it has to beconsidered in all steps of the operational planning.

Bakgrund: Katastrofer orsakar stor skada på samhällen och människor samt är svåra att förebygga helt. Trycket på sjukvården ökar markant till följd av katastrofer. Sjuksköterskorna är den professionen som blivit synonym med katastrofvård. Syfte: Syftet med litteraturstudien var att belysa sjuksköterskors upplevelser av att vårda i ett katastrofdrabbat område. Metod: Studien genomfördes som en allmän litteraturstudie med induktiv ansats. Underlaget blev åtta kvalitativa resultatartiklar som bearbetades genom en innehållsanalys. Resultat: Studiens resultat påvisade att vårda i en katastrofvar mer komplext och hade fler dimensioner än vården i en icke katastrofmiljö. Sjuksköterskorna upplevde påfrestningar i form av yttre faktorer som farliga miljöer, bristande resurser, utmattande arbetsförhållanden och kulturella skillnader. Sjuksköterskorna mötte moraliska dilemman och tvingades till ställningstaganden med direkt påverkan på egen och patientens hälsa. En ökad emotionell och fysisk belastning på sjuksköterskorna förekom under katastrofen Konklusion: Sjuksköterskornas upplevelser grundade sig i de yttre faktorerna som i sin tur skapade moraliska dilemman. De upplevelserna la grunden till de emotionella och fysiska påfrestningarna som sjuksköterskorna upplevde. Det finns behov av vidare forskning kring omvårdnad i katastrofer för att möjliggöra bättre förberedelser vilket skulle stärka sjuksköterskornas resiliens och därav öka kvalitén på vården. / Background: Disasters cause great damage to communities as well as people and arehard to entirely prevent. The amount of workload on healthcare is heavily increased as aresult of a disaster. The nursing profession has become synonymous with disaster care. Aim: The aim of this study was to illustrate nurses' experiences of caring in a disasterstricken area. Method: The method used in this study was a general literature study with an inductive approach. Eight qualitative articles became the basis of this study and these were processed through a content analysis. Result: The result in this study showedthat caring in a disaster was more complex and featured additional dimensions compared to that of a non disaster-stricken environment. The nurses experienced strains from external factors such as dangerous environments, lack of resources, exhausting working conditions and cultural differences. The nurses were caught in ethical dilemmas and were forced to make the hard choices which had a direct impact on theirown and the patients health. An increase in emotional and physical load on the nurseswas apparent throughout the disaster. Conclusion: The nurses' experiences were based on external factors which in turn created ethical dilemmas. These experiences lay the foundation for the emotional and physical strains on the nurses. There is a need forfurther research of disaster nursing to improve the preparations which would in turn strengthen the nurses resilience and thereby increase the quality of care.