Investigation of the relationship between pre-service teachers' preparedness, risk perception and attitude levels towards natural disasters

Since Turkey is a country of disasters due to its geographical location in the world, it is seen that various natural disasters occur within the borders of the country, in different parts of the country. For this reason, people living in different regions continue their lives with the possibility of facing many disaster dangers in the future as they have lived in the past. Therefore, it is of great importance to learn to live with disasters in Turkey and to receive the necessary training at this point. Since the foundations of disaster education are laid in schools, educational institutions and teachers have important duties and serious responsibilities. In order to manage a possible disaster situation, the natural disaster readiness, risk perception and attitude levels of teacher candidates who are studying in schools and will teach in different regions of the country in the future are closely related to the efficiency and effectiveness of disaster training. This study, which was carried out for this purpose, examined the natural disaster readiness, risk perception and attitude levels of pre-service teachers and the relationship between them within the scope of various variables; gender, age, department of education, grade level, geographical region where they live, first aid training status, disaster training status, AFAD Emergency Call Application (APK) status on their phones, disaster exposure, relative's exposure to disaster, loss of a relative in disaster, economic loss in disaster, family economic income level. In this study, which was carried out to determine the disaster readiness, risk perception and attitude levels of pre-service teachers, the relational screening model, which is one of the quantitative screening methods, was used. The research was carried out with 449 pre-service teachers who are actively studying at the Faculty of Education of Kütahya Dumlupınar University in the spring semester of the 2024-2025 academic year. The data of the study were collected with the "Disaster Readiness Scale" developed by Şentuna and Çakı, (2020), the "Disaster Risk Perception Scale" developed by Mizrak and Aslan, (2020) and the "Disaster Attitude Scale" developed by Türkan, Kılıç and Tiryakioğlu, (2019). As a result of the testing of the obtained data with frequency-percentage distributions, arithmetic mean, standard deviation values, Kruskal Wallis and Mann Whitney U test, it was concluded that the readiness levels of the pre-service teachers were close to the low level, their risk perception and attitude levels were at a moderate level with similar results, and the following suggestions were made. The addition of applied courses to the existing disaster education courses in the faculties of education can be paved with the necessary academic research. Courses aimed at improving disaster awareness in faculties of education, especially in departments with low disaster awareness, should be included in the program. Compulsory seminars and similar trainings should be included in the program in order to improve the pre-disaster, during and post-disaster knowledge levels of teacher candidates. Studies should be carried out to eliminate the deficiencies in the disaster knowledge levels of the institutions and organizations that come to schools for disaster education.