Masters in Risk, Crisis & Disaster Management (Distance Learning)

During the last forty years, risk has increasingly become of interest to social analysts and practitioners. Risk, however, is not a new problem. It could be argued that humans have been attempting to manage the problem of risk for as long as they have had powers of cognition. Certainly, from examining early documentary sources, the risk issue has been considered for almost as long as writing itself.

In the complex social world in which we now live, particularly since the 1980s, risk has emerged as a key concept for the social sciences. Some theorists have even suggested that risk represents a fundamental principle for organisation in the social sciences.

This module aims to provide a theoretical resource for risk, crisis, and disaster management. You’ll be presented with different conceptualisations of psychological approaches to risk together with operational risk management from the worlds of commerce and business. This will include tensions between ‘minimising loss’ and ‘protecting profit’, as well as the relationship between risk elimination, control and transfer.

This module provides comprehensive knowledge of methodological issues in social science research.

The fundamental aim of this unit is to offer an introduction to research and to introduce you to basic issues, such as how to choose suitable research topics and the importance of issues such as ‘validity’ in research.

Within this module, you will explore the different research methods that you can use in risk, crisis and disaster management research and what constitutes methodology. This module will cover topics such as research ethics, literature review, research design, data gathering techniques, analysis approaches and the presentation of data. The final unit of this module offers detailed information on how to write a research proposal.

In this module you’ll examine in depth a range of case studies involving crises and disasters from different areas which will act as heuristics ‑ vehicles for exploring some of the issues and concepts introduced in previous modules.

Such issues include the impact of personality on crisis and disaster management, the influence of cultural factors and national preferences on crisis and disaster management techniques, and the impact on disaster investigations of paradigmatic interpretations of evidence.

The case studies present data in a way which is typical of research in a variety of social science disciplines such as ethnographic (participant observation) analysis of secondary data sources (e.g. a re-examination of public inquiry findings, police reports, etc.) and interview findings. They also illustrate the relationship between theoretical and methodological orientations and different academic disciplines.

This module describes the likely orientations of seven potential participants to a situation of risk assessment, crisis or disaster management – from the necessary dispassion and objectivity of central government departments, to the committed agendas of environmentalists engaged in a public debate over an airport expansion programme, to the reaction of victims’ relatives toward the handling of an aircraft investigation. The module illustrates how disasters may act as ‘heuristics’, enabling ‘at-risk’ communities to come to a better understanding of their own imperilled situation, and shows the multi-dimensional character of disasters.

This module concentrates on the practical management of risks, crises and disasters. It is deliberately eclectic, covering such varied topics as post-traumatic stress disorder, mass evacuation of civilian populations, and the use of probabilistic risk assessments in land-use planning decisions.