The process of business recovery from disaster has yet to be studied comprehensively. Understanding this process is important not only to characterize and reduce attrition post-disaster but also to determine whether private and government disaster relief policy, business owner practices and family and community factors are leading to recovery. Research to date has narrowly focused on business characteristics and not on the interactions and interdependencies among businesses, the business owner's family, and the community. A systems theory approach advocates considering simultaneous stressors on the business, family, and community to understand what leads to business demise or recovery. Comprehensive data on business owners and their families will be gathered to assess the extent to which family considerations and owner patterns of adjustment to change impact business recovery or non-recovery. The study will also examine disaster aid practices and policy and the role of community in business owner decisions post-disaster. The study will further the development of a systems theory based model of sustainability in small businesses when the stressors impact not only the business but also the family of the owner, and the community where the business is located. The study offers a method of locating owners of demised businesses and will provide results that include the experience of owners of these businesses, something that has not been reported in the literature. Survival analysis will be utilized to follow owners and their businesses (recovered or not) over time to characterize the process of recovery and demise and examine the predictors and timing of demise. It is clear that some businesses fail immediately, but some appear to be survivors but fail at a later date. Thus, this study of recovery from disaster will to be conducted over time to monitor the process.
Four broad impacts will result from this study. First, this comprehensive over-time assessment using a large number of business owners (recovered and demised) will provide direct, comparative data that will enable assessment of current disaster assistance policy. It will significantly extend past research by including the experience of owners of demised businesses. Second, the study will provide a new lens for understanding the process of both recovery and demise of small businesses, and what may be necessary to increase survival rates. This information will be valuable to educating business owners, families, and government agencies on strategies to improve business survival rates. A third key impact is the opportunity to assess whether minority and women-owned businesses were disadvantaged in recovery compared to majority business owners, and if so, in what ways. Finally, the study will extend development of the systems theory based Sustainable Family Business Model by enabling simultaneous disruptions on the family, the business, and the community. The model has never been tested to include the impact of simultaneous stressors to interacting systems.
