Resilience toward Volcanic Eruptions: Risk Perception and Disaster Microinsurance in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In my opinion there are insufficient evidences to link perception of risk with the adoption of insurance measures. Risk perception is a different concept respect to the knowledge of risk. See for example the studies conducted on risk perception by Slovic, Marincioni, etc. A collection of these studies can be found here: Renn's (2008) integrative model for risk perception.

Author Response

Few studies, nevertheless, have made an attempt to show the link between perception of risk and adoption of insurance. Among others are: Xu, D., Liu, E., Wang, X., Tang, H. & Liu, S. 2018, "Rural Households' Livelihood Capital, Risk Perception, and Willingness to Purchase Earthquake Disaster Insurance: Evidence from Southwestern China", International journal of environmental research and public health, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 1319. (doi:10.3390/ijerph15071319) Royal, A. & Walls, M. 2019, "Flood Risk Perceptions and Insurance Choice: Do Decisions in the Floodplain Reflect Overoptimism?", Risk analysis, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 1088-1104. (https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13240) We added these literature in our literature review. See page 4, last paragraph, in the revised version of our paper. We believe our definition of risk perception is similar with that in Slovic (1987) and Renn (2004a and 2004b). We cited these papers in the revised version of our paper. See page 4 paragraph 3  in the revised paper. Slovic, P. (1987), "Perception of Risk", Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 236, no. 4799, pp. 280-285. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1698637) Renn, O. 2004, "Perception of Risks", Geneva papers on risk and insurance. Issues and practice, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 102-114. (doi:10.1111/j.1468-0440.2004.00275.x) Renn, O. 2004, "Perception of risks", Toxicology letters, vol. 149, no. 1, pp. 405-413. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxlet.2003.12.051)

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The study investigates the influence of the perception of natural hazard risks on the probability of a respondent being interested in participating in a disaster microinsurance scheme. The authors use household data containing people’s willingness to take a hypothetical disaster microinsurance scheme to assess a specific disaster risk perception, notably the risk of an eruption of Mount Merapi in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I found the paper interesting. I believe the paper will be a good addition to sustainability journal. However, the manuscript requires some moderate modifications before publication. Please find more details in the second comment below.

 

Major Issues:

• Lines 190-193: The authors wrote that “There are five villages in the Cangkringan subdistrict, but the team focused on three villages: Glagaharjo, Kepuharjo, and Umbulharjo. The number of households in these villages are 1,163, 920, and 1,379 respectively, or 40% of total households in the Cangkringan subdistrict”.

Please clarify why these villages were selected.

• Line 209: Table 1- the table is not clear for the reader. “N” should be defined in the table. I would suggest reformatting the table in a proper manner.

 

• I would prefer to see the results in figures using for example bar charts or any other informative figures. Visualization can help the reader to follow the numbers and percentages more easily. Please provide some figures in the results section.

Minor Issues:

• Extensive editing of English language and style required.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 3:

Comment 1:
Lines 190-193: The authors wrote that “There are five villages in the Cangkringan subdistrict, but the team focused on three villages: Glagaharjo, Kepuharjo, and Umbulharjo. The number of households in these villages are 1,163, 920, and 1,379 respectively, or 40% of total households in the Cangkringan subdistrict”. Please clarify why these villages were selected.

Response:
Thanks for remind us about this. We randomly chose the three villages. We stated this in the revised version, page 6, last paragraph.

Comment 2:
Line 209: Table 1- the table is not clear for the reader. “N” should be defined in the table. I would suggest reformatting the table in a proper manner.

Response:
Based on you next suggestion, we converted the old Table 1 to graph.

Comment 3:
I would prefer to see the results in figures using for example bar charts or any other informative figures. Visualization can help the reader to follow the numbers and percentages more easily. Please provide some figures in the results section.

Response:
We cannot present our results as graphs. However, we can convert the old Tables 1 and 4 into graphs. Hence, we did so.

Comment 4:
Extensive editing of English language and style required.

Response:
We have asked an English editor to look at our paper.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper investigates the influence of the perception of disaster risks on the probability of local people participating in a hypothetical disaster microinsurance scheme. The following comments for the authors to improve the quality of this paper.

1. The novelty and significance of this work should be clearly stated in the introduction. What are the research gaps to address in this work? Why was this work done?
2. The definition of risk perception should have a citation, for example, the work of “Quantification of risk perception: Development and validation of the construction worker risk perception (CoWoRP) scale”
3. There should be some hypotheses to be tested in this study.
4. What is the demographic information of the participants, such as age, gender, education level?
5. The measurements of risk perception and other constructs were not clearly stated. For the measurement of risk perception, only one question ‘Was your place of residence in a disaster-prone area (for any natural hazard events)?’ was not enough to reliably and validly measure risk perception.
6. The discussion of the results was not in-depth and should be compared with previous studies.
7. The practical implications of this study should be stated.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2:
This paper investigates the influence of the perception of disaster risks on the probability of local people participating in a hypothetical disaster microinsurance scheme. The following comments for the authors to improve the quality of this paper.

Comment 1:
The novelty and significance of this work should be clearly stated in the introduction. What are the research gaps to address in this work? Why was this work done? 

Response:
We followed your suggestion and have clearly stated our novelty and significance in the introduction. See page 2, 2 paragraphs from below.

Comment 2:
The definition of risk perception should have a citation, for example, the work of “Quantification of risk perception: Development and validation of the construction worker risk perception (CoWoRP) scale” 

Response:
In defining risk perception we refer to the definition by Slovic (1987) and Renn (2004a and 2004b). We cited thier papers in the revised version of our paper. See page 4 paragraph 3  in the revised paper.

Slovic, P. (1987), "Perception of Risk", Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 236, no. 4799, pp. 280-285. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1698637)

Renn, O. 2004, "Perception of Risks", Geneva papers on risk and insurance. Issues and practice, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 102-114. (doi:10.1111/j.1468-0440.2004.00275.x)

Renn, O. 2004, "Perception of risks", Toxicology letters, vol. 149, no. 1, pp. 405-413. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxlet.2003.12.051)

Comment 3:
There should be some hypotheses to be tested in this study.  

Response:
In revised version of the paper, we inserted our hypothesis. See page 6, paragraph 2.

Comment 4:
What is the demographic information of the participants, such as age, gender, education level? 

Response:
We added this demographic information in page 7, paragraph 2, in the revised version of our paper.

Comment 5:
The measurements of risk perception and other constructs were not clearly stated. For the measurement of risk perception, only one question ‘Was your place of residence in a disasterprone area (for any natural hazard events)?’ was not enough to reliably and validly measure risk perception. 

Response:
In page 7, last paragraph, in the revised paper, we clarify how we construct our risk perception measures. Appendix A shows how we check the validity and reliability of our measures for risk perception.

Comment 6:
The discussion of the results was not in-depth and should be compared with previous studies. 

Response:
In the revised version, we revised our discussion on the results and linked our results from previous studies. See, for example, page 11, last paragraph (before Table 6).

Comment 7:
The practical implications of this study should be stated.

Response:
Thank you for the suggestion. We inserted the practical implication at the end of our conclusion section (page 13, last paragraph)

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for revising the manuscript!

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors did a good job in addressing my comments.