RESILIENT COMMUNITIES RESEARCH TEAM
The Resilient Communities Research Team was interested in understanding how physical infrastructure and social networks both influence a community’s ability to recover in the face of disaster, and exploring policy solutions that would improve a community’s resilience and mitigate economic loss. They chose to focus their research on several towns in southern Indiana that were hit by deadly tornadoes in March 2012. Megan Sapp Nelson is an associate professor of library science at Purdue and a member of the team. For her contribution to the project, Sapp Nelson interviewed disaster responders from organizations such as the Indiana Department of Homeland Security and Red Cross, who were involved with recovery efforts in Henryville and several other towns in southern Indiana. Using Nvivo software, she then analyzed those interviews to identify themes related to the team’s research questions around the relationships between people’s social and physical infrastructure. Her teammates designed a survey that was sent out to households across the recovery area and used the resulting collected quantitative data to explore how a family or individual’s social networks and the damage to their physical infrastructure affected their recovery time. They are now starting to model the quantitative and qualitative data to understand what factors most influence household and community recovery time. One interesting finding from their initial analysis is that the elderly, with weaker social networks, take longer to rebound. Sapp Nelson expects the team will be uncovering more insights as data analysis continues. Thinking about determining factors in the project’s success, she said, “We actually spent quite a bit of time defining research methods.… No one person defined the scope and vision of the project; everyone brings some of the scope and some of the vision with them.” The project scope was defined by a diverse team with backgrounds in science, the humanities, and the social sciences. Rosalee Clapson, a project member and head of the political science department, said, “We had to spend some time learning each other’s language, so to speak, and understanding each other’s assumptions about approaches to hypothesis testing, data analysis, and interpretation of findings. To study disaster recovery and community resilience, it is critically important to consider both physical and social factors. Having engineers, political scientists, a philosopher, a library scientist, and a communication scholar on the team provides an incredible opportunity to understand the problem and make policy recommendations to help communities prepare for disasters.” Mullins, who also served as principal investigator for the grant, set the expectation that a librarian would play an essential role as both researcher and facilitator in each of the five projects. “In the libraries, we come into contact with disciplines throughout the university. We have great respect for those disparate methodologies, and we can help interpret different methodologies from one discipline to another. The university library…[is] really a microcosm of the university.”CROSS-DISCIPLINARY AGREEMENT
So far, early findings bear out the effectiveness of this multidisciplinary research model. Sapp Nelson described a satisfying moment when she learned the themes that emerged in her interviews matched both the qualitative and quantitative data collected from household surveys: “One of the things I think that’s interesting that emerged in the data is that the elderly take longer to rebuild. I have that in my qualitative data as just anecdotal evidence from people who are very experienced disaster response professionals.… The fact that it came up at the household level data and that we can identify that happened, that was one of those moments when I thought, excellent, that’s pretty great.” With these solid findings backed up by mixed methods research, Indiana policy makers can target the elderly as part of disaster preparedness and community resilience plans. Meanwhile, Purdue University now has a model for interdisciplinary research that it can use in future cross-department collaborations.We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing
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