2025 Volume 23 Issue 4 Pages 553-
The objective of this study is to examine the impact of instructional content and sentence-final expressions in disaster information on evacuation behavior, with a focus on identifying effective expressions in the context of meta-messages. A questionnaire survey was conducted among university students in Tokyo to assess their evacuation awareness towards 25 types of evacuation instructions, which are comprised of instructional content (5 types) and sentence-final expressions (5 types). The survey utilized a 5-point scale to evaluate participants' perceptions. The results indicated that instructional content, such as "take action to save your life," "run away," and "evacuate," along with imperative and polite sentence-final expressions, exhibited a tendency to enhance evacuation awareness. However, no synergistic effect was observed in certain instances, contingent on the specific combination of instructional content and sentence-final expressions. For instance, the combination of "evacuate" with the imperative form demonstrated high effectiveness, while the combination of recommendation and request expressions exhibited reduced effectiveness. This finding indicates that a suitable combination of instructional content and sentence-final expressions is crucial for effective communication of disaster information.
