The Study of functional responses to stress in three cities.

Analyses the effect of the structure of society on the nature of response to stress situations in Italy, Japan and the United States. The particular kind of stress situations studied were natural disasters. An earthquake and two water induced disasters were studied for each society. The study of the three nations was approached from an institutional/structural perspective in which demographic, economic, political and communication variables were treated as independent variables. While all of these variables were studied, particular emphasis was given to the effect of centralization on the performance of disaster response functions. The following eight disaster response functions were analyzed: warning, emergency preparedness, evacuation, inventory, victim care, security, welfare and emergency restoration of services. Italy, Japan and the United States are similar in that they all have large populations, advanced economies, and are politically modern democracies. Italy and Japan differ from the United States in that they are centralized nations and the United States is decentralized