Preparing y for what? Developing multi-dimensional measures of community wildfire preparedness for researchers, practitioners and households Patrick D. Dunlop A,D,F , Ilona M. McNeill A,D,E , Jessica L. Boylan A,D , David L. Morrison B,D and Timothy C. Skinner C,D A School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. B Chancellery, Murdoch University, 90 South Street, Murdoch, Perth, WA 6150, Australia. C School of Psychological and Clinical Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Ellengowan Drive, Casuarina, NT 0810, Australia. D Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, Level 5, 340 Albert Street, East Melbourne, Vic. 3002, Australia. E Present address: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, 1-100 Grattan Street, Parkville, Vic. 3010, Australia. F Corresponding author. Email: patrick.dunlop@uwa.edu.au Abstract. In an effort to reduce wildfire risk to community members, researchers and practitioners have sought to identify the factors that are most effective in motivating community members to engage in preparatory behaviours. Quantitative research in this area has been hampered, however, by a lack of consistency in, and validation of household wildfire preparedness assessments. Consequences have included a difficulty in comparing results across quantitative studies, a poor collective understanding of how existing preparedness assessments were developed and an inability to ascertain how specific preparedness actions are tied to householders’ responses to wildfire. We propose to resolve these issues by (1) presenting a definition of wildfire preparedness for adoption as the standard in quantitative studies, (2) developing a typology of wildfire preparedness that distinguishes between household wildfire goals (i.e. safe evacuation, effective active defence and improving the fire resistance of a property in the absence of an active defender), (3) constructing two new standardised measures of preparedness and (4) undertaking a community survey to investigate the validity of the measures. The development of the new measures will facilitate the standardisation of future research into wildfire preparedness, while differentiating between types of preparedness, and is expected to yield practical benefits. Additional keywords: bushfire, CHWPA, HWiPR, measure development, measurement, standardised. Received 29 August 2013, accepted 22 April 2014, published online 21 July 2014 Introduction Increased variation in climate patterns, with more extreme weather conditions, very likely increases the risk of wildfire (Running 2006; Westerling et al. 2006; Flannigan et al. 2009; Liu et al. 2010; Wotton et al. 2010). Therefore, in many coun- tries that suffer from wildfire threat, fire and emergency agen- cies are attempting to motivate individuals to better prepare for wildfires to reduce the effect of wildfire on property and lives (Partners in Protection 2003; ACT Emergency Services Agency 2011; CFA 2011; DFES 2012; National Fire Protection Asso- ciation 2012). To assist in this regard, scientists are employing quantitative research methods to better understand the factors that explain individuals’ preparatory behaviours (Bright and Burtz 2006; Martin et al. 2007; Bates et al. 2009; Martin et al. 2009; McFarlane et al. 2011). However, to date this work has been hampered somewhat by a lack of agreement in how preparedness is defined and quantitatively operationalised, making it difficult to compare and generalise results across studies. This study seeks to tackle this problem by presenting a typology of wildfire preparedness, based on three key household wildfire goals, and by offering a set of collated and refined multifactorial self-report measures in line with this typology. These measures, which drew from past work on wildfire pre- paredness undertaken in Australia, Canada and the USA, can be used by researchers and practitioners in the future to quantita- tively assess wildfire preparedness in a standardised manner. Conceptualising and operationalising wildfire preparedness In most quantitative studies of preparedness, self-report ‘checklists’ are used to assess preparedness either retrospec- tively or prospectively. Retrospectively, participants may be CSIRO PUBLISHING International Journal of Wildland Fire 2014, 23, 887–896 http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/WF13141 Journal compilation Ó IAWF 2014 www.publish.csiro.au/journals/ijwf