Measuring community resilience to crowd safety risks: Development of the Crowd Safety Culture and Terrorism Preparedness scales

• The first standardised scales to measure community resilience to crowd safety risks. • Tests the Crowd Safety Culture and Terrorism Preparedness with 1,129 people. • Validates the scales as moderate predictors of risk-taking behaviour in crowds. • Identifies demographic variations in safety culture and preparedness levels. • Provides benchmark tools for cross-cultural research and targeted interventions. Crowd safety risks manifest in different forms and can have significant consequences. While top-down interventions, such as regulations and engineering controls, are critical, the role of individual crowd members in risk resilience is often underestimated; that is, how their preparedness level and actions can meaningfully reduce risks or mitigate their impact. This study follows the concept of the Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety by highlighting the overlooked value of community-embedded measures, i.e., the bottom-up grassroots safety approaches, as a risk mitigation tool. We argue this must start with breaking down and quantifying community resilience. However, there is currently no existing metric or standardised tool to systematically assess community readiness. Here, we address this gap by introducing the concept of Crowd Safety Culture as a measurable, multifaceted construct encompassing (i) attitudes, (ii) situational awareness and vigilance, (iii) risk aversion, (iv) knowledge and actions, and (v) social norms. A self-report instrument is developed to quantify and measure this construct, alongside a specialised and related instrument designed to measure preparedness specifically for terrorism-related risks in crowded spaces. The results demonstrate that scores on the two scales correlate positively and significantly, supporting their conceptual overlap. Factor analyses confirm five key dimensions for crowd safety culture and three distinct dimensions for terrorism preparedness. Validation is further tested using perceptual measures of stated risk tolerance and objective knowledge-based questions. Crowd safety culture score demonstrated a moderate ability to predict risk-taking behaviour, with higher scores associated with a reduced tendency to join crowds in risky conditions. Females scored higher on safety culture, while males scored higher on terrorism preparedness. Older individuals scored higher than younger in safety culture, while no significant differences in terrorism preparedness were observed. These instruments are designed to uncover potential demographic-, profile-, or culture-specific differences and provide standardised empirical tools to assess and proactively monitor the state of crowd safety culture and preparedness at a community level. More importantly, they can serve as an empirical foundation for developing targeted evidence-based behavioural interventions and educational campaigns to enhance community-level safety and resilience from the ground up.