Enhancing American Resilience: Testing An Alternative Evaluation Method For Governmental Contingency Planning

As the frequency of US-based disasters increases, so does the need for effective governmental contingency planning and improvement. The current, external evaluation method presents several opportunities for improvement, including cost, efficacy of results, and turnaround time for results. Utilizing a tabletop exercise as it's model, this study designed a self-evaluation tool to test if the data provided by such a tool is similar to the data provided by an external evaluator. After testing it in a government-sanctioned tabletop exercise, the tool showed its ability to be utilized in an exercise and evaluate the participants, based off their perceived success in the exercise. The results of the study indicate a strong, positive correlation between the results of the participant and evaluator populations surveyed as well as statistical equality between the two groups.