The Study of Theoretical Approach of Natural Disaster Management in Iran using Meta-analysis

Population growth and unplanned urban development has led to increase the risk of disaster in urban areas. Achievement to knowledge and ways to deal with disasters, have attracted attention of residents and researchers to natural disaster management. The number and variety of published scientific papers in the field of natural disasters is one of the reliable proofs for showing the trend of researchers to this field. The objective of this research is meta-analyzing the published papers in Persian scientific journals.

 For meta-analyzing of theoretical approach of Natural Disaster Management in Iran, initially 29 journals are selected. Then 454 papers are selected among these journals. These papers have been published from 2002 to 2016. Finally, for analyzing the papers, the analyzing criteria such as research methodology, sampling method and planning model and approach are determined using the expert’s opinion.

The map of studies distribution showed that Tehran, Khorasan-e-Razavi, and Azerbaijan-e-sharghi provinces have been considered in a lot of papers. Results showed that physical approach is the dominant approach in the studies which is a weakness in papers. Also disregarding the scientific principle of research methodology such as absence of sampling, reliability, and validity is the other weakness of studies.

Considering the dominant approach in the previous studies, studying and using the community-based and organizational approaches in the future researches is proposed. The policies of scientific journals in publishing applied papers is led to aggregation of these papers in the journals. So it is proposed due to importance of theoretical and fundamental studies and identifying indicators in the field of disaster management, scientific journals would have special attention to theoretical papers in this context and providing the condition to presentation of more theoretical and fundamental papers in this subject.