Clarifying “flood experience”: A novel conceptual model demonstrates how a flood experience emerges and what determines its intensity and character

Understanding the ways people experience and remember floods is of key importance for flood risk management policies; accordingly, there is a considerable body of studies and findings on flood experience and its various aspects. However, despite these efforts and their significance for relevant research and praxis, the concept of flood experience by itself remains undertheorized and underexamined. In this study, we address this crucial knowledge gap both in terms of theory and empirical evidence; we propose a novel conceptualization and model covering the ways a flood experience emerges, outlining its constituents and their relations, and demonstrating how these translate into the respective memories, meanings, and knowledge. Further, we probe the model by means of content, statistical, and network analyses of data collected in a region regularly affected by floods. Our findings support the model's relevance and adequacy, point to the key role the personal (practical, emotional) engagement of individuals in relevant events and activities plays in affecting the intensity and (after)effects of a flood experience, challenge some of the traditionally utilized concepts and approaches (for example, the distinction between direct and indirect experience, or the “affected versus not affected” dichotomy), and prove that flood experience is a much more complex phenomenon than has been suggested by the literature on flood risk perceptions so far. Finally, we discuss our findings' relevance for flood risk research and management.