Introduction.

The substantive research on human behavior in disasters which is now in progress is so various that it is difficult to represent within short compass. Three papers in this issue exhibit quite different but typical empirical studies. The first, from the National Opinion Research Center, displays the kind of material which can be developed from interviewing people who have recently undergone the impact of floods, earthquakes, and other adventitious calamities. In this type of research, the conditions of real danger and suffering and of normally complicated community organization offer advantages; the opportunity to design an experiment is, however, minimal. The second paper, from the Human Resources Research Office of the Army, exemplifies the rare opportunity to experiment with attitudinal preparation for a real atomic explosion, however under more orderly conditions than would obtain in an actual attack. The third paper, by Dr. Hudson, is a sample of the laboratory approach to problems in this field, in which the experimenter manipulates simulated conditions as independent variables in order to investigate dependent variables of personal and social behavior under anxiety, ambiguous perception, and apparent threat. A conclusion from the three papers as a group is that all the methods of social science - surveying, participant observation, clinical interview, laboratory experiments, and many others - are applicable to illuminating the human effects of disastrous situations.