“I relied on my intuition, not the media, to protect my family.”: A sense of personal responsibilities emerged during the triple disasters in Japan, 2011

Abstract

Research to date has shown that positive and negative emotions play an important role in influencing various processes of self-regulation (Aspinwall, 1988; Fredrickson, 2001).

However, the results of such research on the role of emotions on people’s behaviour vary. For example, it’s argued that people with positive emotions tend to underestimate the probability of negative events such as illness and accident and overestimate their chances of achieving their goals (Schwarz & Bohner, 1996).

Our study investigated the nature of emotions experienced by Japanese people who were in Japan at the time of the triple disasters (i.e., the Great East Japan Earthquake, a massive tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident) which happened in March 2011. The study also explored how such emotions are related to one another. Participants were recruited through social network services (SNSs) and responses were received from 322 people over three weeks. A web-based questionnaire was designed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data were analysed and discussed previously (Mizutani and Koda-Dallow, 2016). The current study analyses the qualitative data collected through an open-ended optional question in the questionnaire. The data analysed through NVivo will be presented and implications of the findings will be discussed.