Electronic Physician (ISSN: 2008-5842) http://www.ephysician.ir March 2018, Volume: 10, Issue: 3, Pages: 6478-6486, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.19082/6478 Corresponding author: Associate Professor Dr. Bahram Saleh Sedghpour. Faculty of Educational Sciences, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Iran. Tel/Fax: +98.2122970060-2393; Email: bsspour@gmail.com, and sedghpour@srttu.edu Received: October 30, 2017, Accepted: December 28, 2017, Published: March 2018 iThenticate screening: December 20, 2017, English editing: February 24, 2018, Quality control: March 02, 2018 This article has been reviewed / commented by five experts © 2018 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Page 6478 The predictors of earthquake preparedness in Tehran households Maryam Ranjbar 1 , Ali Akbar Soleimani 2 , Bahram Saleh Sedghpour 3 , Farahnaz Mohammadi Shahboulaghi 4 , Douglas Paton 5 , Mehdi Noroozi 6 1 Ph.D. Candidate of Psychology, Institute for Humanities and Social Studies; Social Determinants of Health Research Center, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation, Tehran, Iran 2 Ph.D. in Psychology, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Science and Culture, ACECR, Institute for Humanities and Social Studies, Tehran, Iran 3 Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, Associate Professor, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Iran 4 Ph.D. in Nursing, Associate Professor, Social Determinants of Health Research Center, Department of Nursing, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation, Tehran, Iran 5 Ph.D. in Psychology, Professor, School of Psychological and Clinical Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia 6 Ph.D. in Epidemiology, Assistant Professor, Social Determinants of Health Research Center, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation, Tehran, Iran Type of article: Original Abstract Background: The high risk of an earthquake happening and the harmful consequences that it leaves, besides the unsuccessful policies for preparing the community for mitigation, suggested that social factors should be considered more in this regard. Social trust is an influencing factor that can have significant impact on people's behavior. Objective: To determine the relationship of the influencing factors on the preparedness of Tehran households against earthquake. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study with 369 participants (February to April 2017) involved through stratified random sampling from selected urban districts of Tehran. The Persian version of an ‘Intention to be prepared’ measurement tool and a standard checklist of earthquake preparedness behaviors were used. The tool was evaluated for internal consistency and test-retest reliability in a pilot study (Cronbach’s α =0.94 and Intra Class Correlation Coefficient =0.92). Results: Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that social trust is the most important predictor for the preparedness mean of changes in Tehran (R 2 =0.109, p<0.001, β: 0.187 for the Preparedness behavior; R 2 =0.117, β: 0.298, p<0.001 for Intention to be prepared; and R 2 =0.142, β: 0.345, p<0.001 for the Perceived preparedness). Conclusion: The relationship between social trust and preparedness dimensions suggested that changing a social behavior is not possible through considering only individual characteristics of community members and not their social networks relations. The programs and policies which try to enhance the social trust in general, may be able to increase public preparedness against earthquakes in the future. Keywords: Preparedness; Earthquake; Household; Social trust; Tehran 1. Introduction The rise in the number and drastic consequences of disasters worldwide and especially in Asia (1), the geographic location of Iran as a high seismic prone country (2) along with the history and risk of earthquake happenings with