Improving the Design of Civil Infrastructure Messages for the Public
| dc.contributor.author | Grinton Jr, Charlie Wendell | en |
| dc.contributor.committeechair | Paige, Frederick Eugene | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Zobel, Christopher W. | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Iorio, Josh | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Saksena, Siddharth | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Wood, Sossena | en |
| dc.contributor.department | Civil and Environmental Engineering | en |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-09-19T08:00:20Z | en |
| dc.date.available | 2024-09-19T08:00:20Z | en |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-09-18 | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Civil infrastructure serves as the driving force behind the evolution of a safe, sustainable, and efficient environment. However, the way information about civil infrastructure has been communicated to the public has been insufficient. Since every human is intrinsically different, designing, and dispersing information about civil infrastructure that accommodates everyone, while also being direct and concise has been a challenge for policymakers and other federal, state, local, and tribal civil engineering stakeholders. Though there has been a plethora of research conducted on message design and communication in other disciplines, little research has been done in the US that focuses on designing more accessible, actionable civil infrastructure messages. The objective of this research was to investigate how to improve the accessibility of civil infrastructure messages and communication infrastructure to enhance the public's ability to make daily infrastructure decisions. This research study utilized quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze and discuss various ways that civil infrastructure messages can be improved. Results from this study are based on the exploration of three different ways in which civil infrastructure messaging can be improved: policy, transportation/roadway safety, and emergency response. Data sources include eight publicly accessible energy policies from 1978-2022, a publicly available dataset of more than 75 thousand WEAs, and a dataset retrieved from Shealy et al. (2020), which collected data on 300 Virginia drivers in both rural and urban areas. A descriptive policy analysis and Flesch-Kincaid readability test were conducted to historically analyze energy policies and understand their accessibility impacts for research question 1; a brain activation network analysis was conducted and nodal network measures (i.e., network density, degree centrality) were used to investigate the cognitive response Virginia drivers had for various types of non-traditional traffic safety messages for research question 2; and sentiment analysis, emotion detection analysis, as well as a two-phased qualitative coding analysis (i.e., in-vivo coding, focused coding) were conducted to investigate how WEAs can be better designed to increase public attention and engagement for research question 3. The findings from this study demonstrate how emotional content that is present in tweets authored by community members affected by the natural disaster event can be incorporated into the WEA template. The findings from research question 1 identified potential issues with accessibility and energy policy. Also, the findings from this study describe the content included in the parallel documents that federal agencies use to communicate the most important information of a policy. The findings from research question 2 demonstrate that while the various types of non-traditional traffic safety messages produced variances in cognitive response, messages that included negative emotional content or statistics should be further explored on their impact on evoking safer driving behaviors. The findings from research question 3 reported on how emotional content could be incorporated into the template design of WEAs. The implications from this dissertation provide valuable insights for policymakers, civil engineers, transportation engineers, and emergency response stakeholders and the conclusions set the stage for future research to improve the design of more accessible civil infrastructure messages. | en |
| dc.description.abstractgeneral | Civil infrastructure messages are used daily, but improper design can make them difficult to understand or to continue to use over long periods of time. Also, every human is different and interprets information about civil infrastructure, which adds a level of difficulty to designing effective civil infrastructure messages. Though there has been a lot of research on the effectiveness of civil infrastructure, little research has used a human-centered design approach to improve civil infrastructure messages. This study analyzes three different ways to improve civil infrastructure messages: policy, traffic safety, and emergency response. We used publicly available energy policies from 1978-2022, data collected by co-authors from Shealy et al. (2020) to analyze the cognitive response of 300 Virginia drivers to various types of non-traditional traffic safety messages, a publicly available dataset of more than 75 thousand Wireless Emergency Alerts sent by FEMA, and a publicly available data set of more than 9.1 thousand tweets about Hurricane Harvey. To analyze this data, this research study utilized various methods to understand how easy policies are to read, to understand how the brains of Virginia drivers respond to different types of non-traditional traffic safety messages and to identify the differences between tweets and WEAs. Results from this study suggest that parallel documents should be published alongside energy policies to help the public understand the main points of the policy, establish a readability metric to use for all energy policies, continue to investigate non-traditional traffic safety messages that included negative emotional content or statistics, measure the brain activation and observe long-term driving behaviors, use more negative emotional content in templated WEAs, and use social media data to better design templated WEAs. The findings reported from this study can be beneficial for various types of civil infrastructure stakeholders such as policymakers, utilities, US State Departments of Transportation, FEMA, alerting officials, and the public to further explore ways in which the language of civil infrastructure messages can be improved to address accessibility issues with energy policy, traffic safety, and emergency response to the public. | en |
| dc.description.degree | Doctor of Philosophy | en |
| dc.format.medium | ETD | en |
| dc.identifier.other | vt_gsexam:40778 | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10919/121158 | en |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.publisher | Virginia Tech | en |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | en |
| dc.subject | Wireless Emergency Alerts | en |
| dc.subject | WEAs | en |
| dc.subject | driver behavior | en |
| dc.subject | neuroimaging | en |
| dc.subject | non-traditional traffic safety messages | en |
| dc.subject | fNIRS | en |
| dc.subject | functional near-infrared spectroscopy | en |
| dc.subject | prefrontal cortex | en |
| dc.subject | network analysis | en |
| dc.subject | sentiment analysis | en |
| dc.subject | emotion classification | en |
| dc.title | Improving the Design of Civil Infrastructure Messages for the Public | en |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Civil Engineering | en |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University | en |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | en |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy | en |
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