Tutorial: Utilizing Crisis management exercises as research instrument

Tutorials & Hands-on Workshops
Tutorial: Utilizing Crisis management exercises as research instrument
Sunday 10-05-2009
12:00 - 14:00

Chair: Joeri van Laere, University of Skövde. Sweden
Room: ISCRAM 4

Many researchers may have the problem that it is hard to identify case studies to study how crisis management actually evolves in practice, or to test whether their solutions really would work in a real crisis. Utilizing crisis management training might be an interesting alternative. There is a growing understanding in public and private organizations that, in order to be prepared for "the worst that may happen us", regular training of personnel, procedures and systems is needed. So all kind of organizations might actually be "practicing" crisis management once or several times a year. From a research perspective these are interesting occasions. A group of people or a group of organizations is conducting a similar kind of exercise several times. There is a strong interest from these trainees to get detailed feedback on their performance. Sounds like almost perfect conditions for a set of research experiments. However, there are of course some pitfalls which can be compared to the general dilemmas of action research, e.g. serving the organizational change process as well as the research process.The tutorial has a "down to earth" - "how to" perspective. The objective is that participants gather initial knowledge and skills on how they might utilize emergency management training exercises as research instruments IN THEIR RESEARCH PROCESS. All presented issues will include a lot of practical examples.