Dr Ken Strahan

Dr Ken Strahan’s thesis was completed in 2017 and investigated the factors influencing household self-evacuation in two Australian bushfires (Perth Hills 2014 and Sampson Flat 2015). His research explored the factors that influenced householders’ decisions to evacuate, identified factors that predict self-evacuation and established the characteristics of self-evacuators. Ken’s findings showed that environmental and social cues and warnings and householders’ perceptions of the threat, of hazard adjustments and of other stakeholders, influenced self-evacuation decision making. His findings suggest that future research on those who wait and see during a bushfire should take account of their decisional rules of thumb and that design and targeting of Australian bushfire safety policy should better account for self-evacuator characteristics.

Ken is the managing director of Strahan Research and is leading a CRC commissioned research project funded by the Victorian Safer Together Program on the application of self-evacuation archetypes.