Reference no: EM133393088

Imagine you are members of a city council for a moderate-sized community. Let's return to our earlier scenario with modifications. A year ago, the city experienced a major flood. The city council discovered considerable variation in the extent to which households in the 100-year floodplain were prepared. At that time, the city council asked the city emergency manager to give a presentation on what the emergency manager planned to do to increase household preparedness over the coming year. The year is over, and the city council has asked the emergency manager to provide data showing the extent to which his or her efforts have caused an increase in household preparedness. To prepare for this report, the emergency manager did a survey at the end of the year. The data show a modest level of preparedness, and the emergency manager claims that this improvement was caused by his or her efforts.

Playing the role of a city council member, challenge the emergency manager's conclusions about the cause/effect relationship between the emergency manager's efforts and household preparedness. The result of doing this exercise should be a better grasp of the causal criteria and the importance of addressing these criteria when trying to show cause/effect connections.