ABSTRACT Vulnerability to natural disasters is increasing globally1,2,3. In parallel, the responsibility for natural hazard preparedness has shifted to communities and individuals4. It is

therefore crucial that households increase their preparedness, yet adoption of household preparedness measures continues to be low, even in high-risk regions5,6,7,8. In addition, few

hazard-preparedness interventions have been evaluated longitudinally using observational measures. Therefore, we conducted a controlled intervention with a 12-month follow-up on adults in

communities in the United States and Turkey that focused on improving household earthquake and fire preparedness. We show that this Fix-it intervention, involving evidence-based,

expectancy and home ownership predicted overall preparedness change in both intervention groups longitudinally, implying that a sense of agency influences preparedness. An unintended

consequence of observation is that it may increase preparedness, as even the control groups changed their behaviour. Therefore, observation of home preparatory behaviours by an external

source may be a way to extend multihazard preparedness across a population. Access through your institution Buy or subscribe This is a preview of subscription content, access via your

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access 25 November 2024 WHY DO PEOPLE NOT PREPARE FOR DISASTERS? A NATIONAL SURVEY FROM CHINA Article Open access 28 February 2024 CLIMATE-RELATED PARTIAL RELOCATION IN FIJI IMPACTS THE

WELLBEING OF THOSE WHO RELOCATED AND THOSE WHO STAYED DIFFERENTLY Article Open access 21 May 2025 DATA AVAILABILITY The data that support the findings of this study are available from the

corresponding author on request. These anonymized data will be held indefinitely in SPSS Portal format. They are accompanied by metadata on the study and a data dictionary describing the

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StataCorp. Stata Statistical Software: Release 15. (StataCorp LLC, 2017). Download references ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was funded by the EPSRC grant Challenging Risk: Achieving Resilience

by Integrating Societal and Technical Knowledge (EP/F012179/1). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the

manuscript. The authors thank R. West for his help in the original design of the study, M. Haklay, P. Rickles and E. Verrucci for their help using geographic information systems to scope

which areas to choose for the study, C. Molina-Hutt for co-running the Seattle intervention and all of the study’s participants. AUTHOR INFORMATION AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Department of

Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK Helene Joffe & Gabriela Perez-Fuentes * Institute of Health Informatics, University College London,

London, UK Henry W. W. Potts * Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, London, UK Tiziana Rossetto * Department of Psychology, Başkent

University, Ankara, Turkey Canay Doğulu * Department of Psychology, Gediz University, Izmir, Turkey Ervin Gul Authors * Helene Joffe View author publications You can also search for this

author inPubMed Google Scholar * Henry W. W. Potts View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Tiziana Rossetto View author publications You can

also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Canay Doğulu View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Ervin Gul View author publications

You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Gabriela Perez-Fuentes View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar CONTRIBUTIONS H.J.

had overall responsibility for devising the study, project planning, training researchers, data analysis and writing up the data. H.W.W.P. directed the data analysis and played a major role

in the project write-up. T.R. played an advisory role in project planning. C.D. and E.G. played a major role in the data collection and running the intervention in Izmir. G.P.-F. was the key

postdoctoral researcher for the duration of the project and played a key role in project planning, running the intervention in Seattle, the data analysis and the write-up. CORRESPONDING

AUTHOR Correspondence to Helene Joffe. ETHICS DECLARATIONS COMPETING INTERESTS The authors declare no competing interests. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Springer Nature remains

neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary tables 1–7, Supplementary

Figure 1, Supplementary Notes, and Supplementary References 1–5. REPORTING SUMMARY RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Joffe, H., Potts,

H.W.W., Rossetto, T. _et al._ The Fix-it face-to-face intervention increases multihazard household preparedness cross-culturally. _Nat Hum Behav_ 3, 453–461 (2019).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0563-0 Download citation * Received: 25 May 2018 * Accepted: 19 February 2019 * Published: 01 April 2019 * Issue Date: May 2019 * DOI:

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