Publication Date
2021
Journal or Book Title
American Behavioral Scientist
Abstract
Interagency coordination is crucial for effective multiagency disaster management. Viewing government and emergency management organizations as vital components of citizens’ disaster communication ecology, this study examines how a group of Texas-based public health departments and emergency management offices engaged in interagency coordination during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing coronavirus-related agency tweets between early February and the end of August 2020, the study assesses two types of interagency coordination: (1) contentlevel coordination in the form of semantic similarity among the selected public agencies serving different jurisdictions and (2) relational-level coordination in terms of referencing common stakeholders through retweeting coronavirus-related information. Using a granular, four-stage construct of a crisis, results identify stage-based variation with regard to peer-to-peer and federal-to-local coordination. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for communication ecology and disaster management.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221992823
Pages
914-933
Volume
65
Issue
7
License
UMass Amherst Open Access Policy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Liu, Wenlin; Xu, Weiai (Wayne); and St. John, Burton, "Organizational Disaster Communication Ecology: Examining Interagency Coordination on Social Media During the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic" (2021). American Behavioral Scientist. 125.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221992823