Measuring Community Resilience and Recovery: A Content Analysis of Indicators

Abstract

Disaster resilience and recovery have been studied from a variety of perspectives including sociology, policy implementation, decision-making, engineering, geography and urban planning. For this reason, there is a wide range of definitions of resilience and recovery, and determining appropriate indicators of recovery and resilience is a challenge for both researchers and practitioners. We begin this paper with a discussion of the varying definitions of recovery, vulnerability and resilience and how they have been utilized in each field. In order to assess what indicators can be used to measure both resilience and recovery, we performed an indepth content analysis on definitions and indicators from existing literature. We analyzed articles from 2000 to 2010 in four disaster-focused journals that include perspectives of engineers, social scientists, practitioners and economists. Articles were selected by a keyword search and analyzed for resilience and recovery indicators using an emergent coding scheme. We classified the indicators of community resilience into infrastructure, social, economic and institutional categories. Recovery indicators were categorized as social, economic, environmental and infrastructure. Researchers can use these results for future studies of causal factors and recovery indicators. Similarly, practitioners will be able to have a condensed opinion of experts in the field of disaster recovery and planning.

Communication Behaviors to Implement Innovations: How Do AEC Teams Communicate in IPD Projects?

“…Archival analysis is an effective approach to answer the “what” questions in research (Yin, ). Content analysis as a way to examine archival data has long been used in organizational studies and construction management research (Jordan & Javernick‐Will, ; Yu, Shen, Kelly, & Hunter, ; Gransberg & Molenaar, ).…”

State of the research in community resilience: progress and challenges

“…Social agents, such as individuals, families, or organizations, need a combination of social, economic, and cultural capitals and capacities to be resilient. Jordan and Javernick-Will (2012) conducted an extended literature review on the definitions of community resilience and recovery in order to assess the indicators common in the measurement of each concept. This work addresses the conflation of several concepts related to resilience, including vulnerability, community capacity, and recovery.…”

Measuring rural community resilience: case studies in New Zealand and Vermont, USA

“…As with community, resilience is not static but can change; it is not isolated at one scale but is nested (Darnhofer 2014, Robinson and Carson 2016. Resilience is also multifaceted and includes a range of dimensions that have been variously termed as factors, capitals, resources, and strengths in the literature (Jordan andJavernick-Will 2012, Matarrita-Cascante et al 2017). These dimensions can be described at a general level, such as social, economic, institutional, and cultural dimensions of resilience, or alternatively, they can be described in more detail, such as social capital, economic development, and community competence (Norris et al 2008).…”