Mainstreaming Women into Disaster Reduction Decision Making in the Built Environment: Research Methodological Perspectives

The role played by the built environment in determining the casualties and monetary costs of disasters emphasises the need of reducing its disaster vulnerabilities to achieve a disaster resilient built environment. The decision-making process in the built environment thus requires integration with disaster risk reduction. This integration further requires identifying women’s specific needs and concerns related to disaster risk reduction in order to reduce women’s higher disaster vulnerabilities. A research aiming at mainstreaming women’s needs and concerns in to decision making process in the built environment to reduce their vulnerabilities is being carried out and this paper focuses on elaborating its research methodology. The methodology of the research will be discussed under three main sections in the paper. The sections will be, philosophical worldviews, strategies of enquiry and the research methods of the study. Having identified the study as a social research and believing in pragmatism the research takes an interpretivist philosophical stance and selects its research strategy as case studies. The paper explains the philosophical positioning of the research and its case study design in detail while justifying the suitability of the methodological selections of the research through various literature. The latter part of the paper will illustrate the choice of data collection and analysis methods with their suitability to the context of this particular research.