Critical Success Factors to Improve Compliance with Campus Emergency Notifications

We have recently witnessed an uptake in the number of campus related incidents. School administrations are increasingly concerned about notification systems to alert students against the incidents and to provide advice on actions that they would like the students to take. However whether students appropriately react to notifications sent by these systems are still less understood. This paper develops and validates an instrument to measure the critical factors (subjective norm, threat appraisal, message efficacy, and media richness) that motivate students to comply with the directions in the notifications. The instrument has been validated through a pretest, followed by a pilot test, finally a main field test based on the data collected from a large Northeastern university. This research attempts to inform both theory and practice, and will help develop policy suggestions on what can be done to improve compliance with emergency notifications on university campus.