Investigating factors for disaster preparedness among residents of Kuala Lumpur

Abstract

The review of past researches discussed that factors such as climate change and movement toward urbanization will result in more frequent and severe disasters in the near future (Yasuhara et al., 2011). Flash flood is the most common type of disaster that residents of Kuala Lumpur (KL) come across, thus in this study, it was desired to discover the factors affecting preparedness among residents of KL as well as assessing the variation of individual preparedness among residents. With the aid of SPSS analysis, the reliability of data, correlation and regression analysis between the investigated factors and disaster preparedness were obtained. According to this research it was found that level of preparedness of residents of KL is still below average; majority of social demographic indicators such as income, education, age, and property ownership showed significant contribution to the variation of disaster preparedness among the residents. For instance men were much more prepared in comparison to women; residents with high level of income and education had also significantly higher preparedness compared to those with low level of income and education. Race was the only factor that differs from the findings of previous studies; since race does not affect the preparedness.