Organizational Disaster Communication Ecology: Examining Interagency Coordination on Social Media During the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Liu, Wenlin; Xu, Weiai (Wayne); John, Burton

Interagency coordination is crucial for effective multiagency disaster management. Viewing government and emergency management organizations as vital components of citizens’ disaster communication ecology, this study examines how a group of Texas-based public health departments and emergency management offices engaged in interagency coordination during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing coronavirus-related agency tweets between early February and the end of August 2020, the study assesses two types of interagency coordination: (1) content-level coordination in the form of semantic similarity among the selected public agencies serving different jurisdictions and (2) relational-level coordination in terms of referencing common stakeholders through retweeting coronavirus-related information. Using a granular, four-stage construct of a crisis, results identify stage-based variation with regard to peer-to-peer and federal-to-local coordination. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for communication ecology and disaster management.