Samantha Cosgrove — 2020 Departmental Research Grant Award Winner

CATEGORIES: Department News

Samantha Cosgrove won the 2020 Departmental Research Grant Award Winner for her project “Hurricane Florence and disaster preparedness: Investigating risk through the intersections of technical communication and user experience.”

Using interdisciplinary theories from technical communication and user experience, this project is a two-part research study exploring communication between the government and public during Hurricane Florence in North Carolina. Although risk, technical communication, and user experience overlap throughout history, it is only recently that these disciplines have been used to study disaster communication from a user and organizational perspective. By utilizing methods from each of these fields, this project is able to provide suggestions for future disaster communication strategies and identify the wicked problems emergency managers face when helping the public.