March 2003
Volume 16, Number 3
An Unplanned Career in Planning
 Mike Lindell received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Colorado in 1975. His primary research focus is on the processes by which individuals and organizations prepare for environmental hazards and respond to them when they strike. He also has done some work on quantitative methods, especially indexes of interrater agreement. |
What is it like to be a psychologist in a Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning? I am on the planning faculty with six professors who have doctoral degrees in planning, three who have their degrees in sociology, and one who has a law degree (but is a certified planner). My research and service activities are relatively similar to what I did when I was in a psychology department, as is my research methods course. However, the rest of the courses I regularly teach are in environmental hazards-an introductory course in hazards and disasters, and advanced courses on disaster response planning, disaster recovery and hazard mitigation planning, and hazard analysis and management.
I obviously did not receive preparation for emergency planning in a psychology department, so how did I get here? The most important step was the first one. As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, I worked for a geographer on an assessment of research on natural hazards. This project provided a remarkable exposure to interdisciplinary, problem-focused research. From there, I went to work for Battelle Institute, spending the next 12 years performing multidisciplinary research for a wide variety of sponsors. I initially worked with sociologists and planners in studies of flood evacuation warnings and the response to the eruptions of Mt. St. Helens. After the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island, I spent much of my time for the next seven years evaluating emergency preparedness at nuclear power plants for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. From 1986-1997, I was at Georgia Tech (a visiting position in the Industrial/Organizational area), Michigan State (a permanent position in I/O), and George Washington (a visiting position in I/O and later a permanent position in Administrative Science).
I came to Texas A&M to direct the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center, a multidisciplinary center that conducts research on environmental hazard management. My background in this area was a good fit with the planning faculty because I had published articles in journals such as the Journal of the American Planning Association and also some books on emergency planning. All of my environmental hazards courses contain a significant amount of material that is related to psychology, but I also teach material from other social sciences as well as the physical sciences and engineering.
Being on a planning faculty has some significant rewards, but it also has some frustrations. I enjoy showing how psychological principles can be applied to problems of emergency planning and many of these are new to the planning faculty and students that I work with. It can be frustrating to spend a lot of time explaining basic psychological principles before getting on to the problem at hand. Sometimes it is a pleasure to talk about psychological concepts and be understood immediately, which is why I have tried to maintain links to psychology departments while employed elsewhere. At Battelle I had an adjunct appointment at the University of Washington and I currently have an adjunct appointment here at Texas A&M.
Perhaps the greatest reward to being on a planning faculty is that agencies look to planners to solve important problems of environmental hazards giving me access to interesting research opportunities. In work for the state of Texas, I reviewed the procedures that were being used to estimate the amount of time required to evacuate coastal counties before hurricane landfall. Transportation planners had devised models of traffic flows, but had no data on how rapidly evacuating households would enter the road network. On the other hand, social scientists had conducted many studies to predict warning response, but most of that research addressed whether households evacuated, not when households evacuated-the information the transportation planners needed. I had some relevant data from my previous research that would satisfy the immediate needs of the evacuation planners, but the need for better data led to a research project funded by the Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. That might seem to be an unlikely funding source for a psychologist, but it just shows how many places there are available to give psychology away, even if you sometimes need to sneak it in.
