30 Years of Dissertation Trends in Disaster Studies

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of universities with disaster or emergency management degree programs. While some once speculated that the proliferation of these programs was a temporary “9-12 effect,” the continued creation of bachelors, masters, and doctoral degree programs even a decade later (see Cwiak 2011) suggests that a more sustained change may be upon us. In this research, we examined trends in the production of disaster knowledge by using dissertations completed on disaster topics in the social and behavioral sciences as a measure of growth (Carr et al. 1986; Cross 1998; Schlachter and Thomison 1974).