Perceiving and Behaving in a Crisis: Developing a Multi-Functional Crisis Information Platform for Psychosocial Situations (CIP-PS)

Abstract

Increasingly long-lasting and complex crises and disasters can cause psychosocial effects on certain population groups with different vulnerabilities. To increase a population’s resilience, it is necessary to examine these effects more deeply by systematically monitoring the psychosocial situation, integrating different types of data and making this data researchable, visible, and documentable via a multi-modal platform. Following a systems thinking approach, this paper presents a full approach to developing a “Multi-Functional Crisis Information Platform for Psychosocial Situations” (CIP-PS) for Germany, which includes the integration of an ontology- and filter-based research component (CIP-REP), a filter-based dashboard component (CIP-DAB), and a documentation component (CIP-DOC) into a complete information platform. In sum, this platform fulfills the requirement of comprehensively integrating different psychosocial data (e.g., survey, meta data, or question item data) into a system capable of fully linking all components and related data to healthcare informatics.