Information Exchange: Publications

Focus groups are a means to discuss and shape ideas, information, and research directions. They also provide an important reality check early enough in a research project to enable mid-course corrections to be made. Two focus groups were conducted for the risk communication portion of the Large Scale Emergency Readiness (LaSER) project at New York University to refine scenario design, factual information, and message sets for two attack scenarios: Sarin and Smallpox. Both attacks were assumed to occur in a very confined physical space namely, a train or train station. These risk communication focus groups dealt with very complex issues associated with how to communicate to people in a disaster in order to minimize injury and death.