A Research on Concepts and Terminology on Crowd Crush: Minimizing Confusion and Creating a Basis for International Standards

Introduction: Crowd crush is a type of disaster that continues to occur around the world, and some of these disasters have a devastating impact on society. Despite the high number of human casualties, there is no single solution, which is why a multidisciplinary approach is required rather than a single solution. Therefore, it is necessary to apply a scientific academic approach to understand crowd crush, but there is confusion on the terms and definitions underlying it. In this study, we aimed to derive appropriate conceptual definitions and terminology for crowd crush through a survey of experts. Methods: Experts were selected by discipline to conduct the expert survey. The experts were selected from the fields of safety and security management, engineering, medicine and health, sociology, and psychology, and a total of 25 experts were selected for in-depth interviews. The experts were selected based on their research, teaching, and consulting activities related to crowd crush, and only those with relevant interests and knowledge were included through preliminary interviews. Results: In some cases, experts expressed the same concept in different terms, and this was more pronounced when the experts came from different disciplines. This is likely due to applying the terminology used in their academic fields to crowd crush, which can be confusing if different terms are used. While most of the concepts and definitions were consistent, some terms needed to be reorganized to fit the context of crowd crush. Conclusion: There is some confusion about the concepts and terminology of crowd crush, even among experts. So a committee is needed to further clarify the concepts and terminology in order to develop standards of prevention, preparedness, and response in the crowd crush situation. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2023R1A2C1002938).