Dr. Eric C. Jones and Dr. Arthur D. Murphy (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) will collaborate with Dr. Linda M. Whiteford and Dr. Graham A. Tobin (University of South Florida) to undertake research on the role of social networks in helping individuals and communities to recover from natural disasters. Previous research has found that using personal and community social networks can be a crucially important complement to help provided by institutions. Social networks appear to enhance individual and group recovery from hazard exposure, evacuations, and community resettlement. However, there are few formal Social Networks Analysis investigations of how these critical relations develop and operate to mitigate disaster effects. This research team will address that gap.
Social Network Analysis can distinguish between groups that are densely connected, moderately connected, and loosely bridged by social ties. In Mexico, this research team found that social networks that produced moderate connections were particularly effective. This new study will build on that finding and consider more precisely the roles played by different kinds of network subgroups within three communities that have been affected in different ways by the ongoing eruptions of Mount Tungurahua, Ecuador. One community was temporarily evacuated; another community is made up of residents permanently resettled community from villages destroyed by recent major eruptions. and the third community has experienced ash falls has stayed put. The researchers will conduct surveys with 150 households about networks, well-being, disaster impact, and household characteristics. These quantitative data will be complemented by in-depth interviews to understand exactly how people recruit assistance from their networks.
This research is important because it will further our understanding of why some people and communities successfully recover from disasters and other do not. In particular, it will answer the question of how access to different kinds of resources from social relationships does or does not help victims adapt to the cascade of impacts that follow in the wake of disaster events. The methodological innovations proposed for this study can be adapted to other social sciences, plus applied to disaster mitigation and resettlement efforts, economic development projects, and political violence, to support the kinds of networks that already exist. The researchers will also provide educational benefits to students who will accompany them to the field.
Collaborative Research: Social Networks in Chronic Disasters - Exposure, Evacuation, and Resettlement The International Disaster Project team studied how personal networks—or the people in your life and how they interact with you and with one another—provided support and even constraint to the people in five villages recovering from major explosions of Mt. Tungurahua in central Ecuador in 1999 and 2006. Of the five villages, two are resettlements, one was not evacuated is slightly affected by chronic ashfall, and two were evacuated and returned but now are heavily affected by chronic ashfall from the ongoing minor eruptions. By collecting information from interviewees about their specific relationships with people in their life, plus how the interviewees were doing economically, mentally and physically, we were able to explore when people were able to support each other, who supported whom and how, and when they weren’t able to support one another. Gender, Support and Networks in Disaster Recovery. Whether women or men gave more support or received more support than did the other gender depended on what the community was going through, such as whether it had been resettled, whether farmland was included in the resettlement, and whether the community was tight-knit or not. Specifically, somewhat sparser networks were better for men, and for women the more dense networks or networks with subgroups were more protective. Wealth and Networks. In our sample of small mainly agricultural communities, the second poorest quintile or second lowest fifth of population was the one that received the most support. In other words, if the poorest quintile needs the most support, it is not getting the most support (in our Mexico research, which was a less agricultural sample, it was the poorest quintile that received the most support). The poorest tended to have tighter (dense or everybody-interacts-with-everybody) networks, and the wealthiest had more of even spread among the various types of networks (everybody-interacts-with-everybody; interacting-subgroups; tight-core-with-loose-periphery; sparse). Wellbeing and Network Structure. Personal networks that had identifiable subgroups in them were the most protective against PTSD in the Ecuador sites, but networks that were dense/tight were almost as protective, while people with extending (tight-core-with-loose-periphery) and sparse (few connections) networks had higher levels of PTSD. We expect that stressful settings can be mitigated best when there are tight group or subgroups that have similar information and care about the interviewee, and that high distress is not mitigated as well when many of the people in one’s life are not well connected to one another. Networks and Perception of Risk from Hazards. The characteristics of the people in one’s network, and the structure of how they’re connected to one another, are associated with perception of past risk for the resettled sites; current risk perception for all sites, and perception of future risk in no sites. The research demonstrates that social networks can work in ways that both exacerbate and/or ameliorate the impacts of disasters. Gender, wealth and welbeing influence the direction of these outcomes, and suggest that these factors of individual recovery have an impact on community resilience.
