Within the realm of disaster recovery, US policy has principally focused on the recovery of place rather than the recovery of person. Although the research community has examined the impact of disasters on individuals, the focus has often been on psychopathological effects, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, or psychosomatic disorders. Little work has been done to examine the long- term arc of recovery in disaster victims, why and how such recovery varies among various sub-populations, and the interventions that might accelerate that process. This study, Research Project (RP) 3, Katrina Impacts on Vietnamese Americans living in New Orleans, LA (KATIVA NOLA), capitalizes on an ongoing disaster cohort made up of first generation Vietnamese American immigrants, who were initially assessed ? as part of an immigration study ? just weeks before Katrina. RP3 also capitalizes upon and complements the two other ongoing cohorts and the two broad-based analyses of representative secondary data that are included in this KATRINA@10 Program. The set of five studies is supported by three support cores. The objective of RP3 is to assess the longer term (5-10 years) effects of a major disaster upon the health of a recent immigrant population by employing a wide range of physical and mental health measures in a longitudinal research design. This objective will be accomplished by collecting a subsequent round of health data for the original cohort of first-generation working age Vietnamese-American New Orleanians who were initially surveyed during the period May - July of 2005 (T0), just prior to Hurricane Katrina, as part of a separate NIH small grant focusing on the health and well-being of Vietnamese immigrants. Three comprehensive health re-assessments of this cohort taken at 1 year (T1), 2-years (T2) and 5 years (T5) post-Katrina are complete. The subsequent round for the research proposed here would occur 10 years post-Katrina during the fall of 2015 (T10) and in conjunction with RP1 RISK and RP2 GCAFH. The analyses of these data will benefit from the inclusion of identical measures in RP1 RISK and RP2 GCAFH in our planned 2015 wave, and with comparable measures from these two sister studies from earlier waves. Another common core set of topics across the three projects will be pursued using an open-ended approach. This latter set of data will be exploited for a series of cross-cutting qualitative analyses.
| Morris, Katherine Ann; Deterding, Nicole M (2016) The emotional cost of distance: Geographic social network dispersion and post-traumatic stress among survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Soc Sci Med 165:56-65 |
| Fussell, Elizabeth; Harris, Elizabeth (2014) Homeownership and Housing Displacement after Hurricane Katrina among Low-Income African-American Mothers in New Orleans. Soc Sci Q 95:1086-1100 |
