Examining the Role of Social Media in Disaster Management from an Attribution Theory Perspective

This paper is related to the use of social media for disaster management by humanitarian organizations. The past decade has seen a significant increase in the use of social media to manage humanitarian disasters. It seems, however, that it has still not been used to its full potential. In this paper, we examine the use of social media in disaster management through the lens of Attribution Theory. Attribution Theory posits that people look for the causes of events, especially unexpected and negative events. The two major characteristics of disasters are that they are unexpected and have negative outcomes/impacts. Thus, Attribution Theory may be a good fit for explaining social media adoption patterns by emergency managers. We propose a model, based on Attribution Theory, which is designed to understand the use of social media during the mitigation and preparedness phases of disaster management. We also discuss the theoretical contributions and some practical implications. This study is still in its nascent stage and is research in progress.