After a recent disaster, community-based organizations known as mutual support centers emerged to organize post-disaster response. This project seeks to examine communities' perceptions of and response to programs implemented by these centers. The project asks: How have communities responded to the emergence of these centers and their projects? What areas of community development have been affected by these implemented projects? The project is focused on communities' capacity to assess and develop solutions to their needs through self-managing community development projects. The project examines how pre-existing social inequalities, which become particularly salient after natural disasters, shape the resulting community response. Findings from this project will provide government agencies, social scientists, and communities with insights related to response and recovery processes. Such findings can assist with policy formulation at multiple levels of government to promote recovery from disasters more efficiently, thus contributing to safety and security in our society.
Sociologists have identified emergent organizations as a common occurrence at the intersection of communities' response to uncertainty and failed communications between impacted communities and formal agencies. However, the ways in which these emergent actors are created, and their internal operationalization of response and recovery, are not well understood. Based on a purposive sampling design, the study will examine five mutual support centers working in different communities throughout the affected region. The project uses a qualitative, multi-technique approach that includes eighty semi-structured interviews with residents of beneficiary communities where the centers have been established, two sets of focus groups with residents in each community, including forty-eight respondents, and ethnographic participant observation in center events, programs and service centers to draw a comprehensive perception of the organizations and programs. After data transcription, the project will code the data using MAXQDA qualitative software by first developing analytical codes followed by lower level codes reflecting characteristics and patterns in the data. Findings from the project will inform sociological theories regarding disaster response, emergent organizations and their communications, and social inequality following extreme events.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
