Read. Understand. Apply.

CONTENT! Over-alerting is not just about frequency and relevancy. It's also about what you include in the message.  Over the past few weeks, I've been writing about the dimensions of over-alerting that  Michele M Wood   and I defined in our recently published paper Opting Out: Over Alerting in the Era of Wireless Emergency Alerts . The one final dimension is CONTENT.  Our study participants explained that messages that are incomplete, incomprehensible, and not actionable,

FALSE ALERTS So far, relevance has focused on alerts that require action 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ (they are urgent, severe, and certain), alerts that you can actually do something about 😴 (as in, not told to shelter inside when it's the middle of the night), and alerts that are geographically specific 🌎 (you're in the area of the threat and the threat is near you). Today, we'll be talking about that one historical event that is seared into the minds around the world. THE FALSE ALERT.  Fals

GEOGRAPHY In our research on over-alerting , we found scholars who wrote about the issues of mis-located alerts, polygons, and how geography affects public perceptions of message relevance.   In the paper by Sara McBride, Ann Bostrom, et al on earthquake early warnings , they pointed to mis-located alerts as a risk related to technology - that is, when technological issues result in alerts going to places where people don't feel shaking. They can be perceived as over-alert

RELEVANCY Earlier this week, in Episode 2, I wrote about the first part of over-alerting, where our research participants described the problem with alert frequency. In Episode 3, I'm going to write about RELEVANCE. This one has a lot of dimensions, and I won't cover them all right now. If you want to read the open access article, click here Sutton J. & Wood, M. (2025) Opting Out. Relevancy was defined broadly by our research participants as "things that affect them."

The first dimension of over-alerting: FREQUENCY In our recently published article on Over-Alerting , Michele Wood and I found three primary dimensions to describe over-alerting:   1. frequency 2. relevance 3. content Beginning with FREQUENCY, we found it was described in multiple ways.   1️⃣ To start, we need to consider how frequently a person's phone lights up, vibrates, or emits a noise to get your attention in general. We live in an "attention economy" and one study we

An Introduction. Just over a year ago, the RAND Corporation published their report assessing public reach of Wireless Emergency Alerts. What stood out to me was not who emergency managers ARE reaching but who they are NOT. In many cases, this can be attributed to OPTING OUT. (25-30% in Texas alone). How do we make sense of this?   My colleague,   Michele M Wood   and I received funding from the US Geological Survey to investigate why people opt out of emergency alerts (if yo

Recently, my colleague Dr. Michele Wood and I published a paper that defines and identifies dimensions of over-alerting. While some of...