Citation

Peerbolte SL, Lloyd Collins M. Disasters 2013; 37(1): 48-60.

Affiliation

Program Analyst, National Planning Response Directorate, Department of Homeland Security, United States Master of Public Administration and Master of Nonprofit Leadership Programs, Walden University, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-7717.2012.01291.x

PMID

23067348

Abstract

Emergency managers must be able to think critically in order to identify and anticipate situations, solve problems, make judgements and decisions effectively and efficiently, and assume and manage risk. Heretofore, a critical thinking skills assessment of local emergency managers had yet to be conducted that tested for correlations among age, gender, education, and years in occupation. An exploratory descriptive research design, using the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal-Short Form (WGCTA-S), was employed to determine the extent to which a sample of 54 local emergency managers demonstrated the critical thinking skills associated with the ability to assume and manage risk as compared to the critical thinking scores of a group of 4,790 peer-level managers drawn from an archival WGCTA-S database. This exploratory design suggests that the local emergency managers, surveyed in this study, had lower WGCTA-S critical thinking scores than their equivalents in the archival database with the exception of those in the high education and high experience group.

Language: en