Pathways to Community Recovery: a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Post-disaster Outcomes

Disaster recovery has been studied from a variety of perspectives including the fields of sociology, engineering, policy implementation, political-ecology, systems theory, geography and urban planning, leading to a wide variety of definitions and indicators for measuring recovery. In order to assess what indicators can be used to measure both pre-disaster resilience and postdisaster recovery, an in-depth content analysis of recovery indicators in existing literature was performed. Articles from 2000 to 2010 in four disaster-focused journals that include perspectives of engineers, social scientists, practitioners and economists were analyzed. Articles were selected by a keyword search and analyzed for recovery indicators using an emergent coding scheme. Interestingly, many research articles never defined recovery. Recovery indicators were categorized as social, economic, environmental and infrastructural. The indicators cited were analyzed based upon the disciplinary affiliation of the author. Authors from different disciplines cited different indicators, suggesting that increased inter-disciplinary collaboration may be needed. As a second step in this research, a multi-round Delphi survey was used to obtain expert opinion on the recovery indicators. This process verified that the set of indicators identified through the content analysis were important and provided a rating of the importance of each indicator. Panelists also provided justifications for any ratings that differed from the median. Researchers can use these results as indicators of recovery in future studies. Similarly, practitioners will be able to use the condensed opinions of experts in the field of disaster recovery and planning. 1 This chapter has been published and should be cited as: Jordan, E., and Javernick-Will, A. N. (2013). “Indicators of Community Recovery: Content Analysis and Delphi Approach.” Natural Hazards Review, 14(1), 21–28. 14 INTRODUCTION Disaster recovery is an interdisciplinary endeavor. As a result, disasters and recovery have been studied from a variety of perspectives including sociology, policy implementation, decisionmaking, engineering, geography and urban planning (Mileti 1999; Olshansky 2005; Peacock and Ragsdale 1997; Phillips 2009). Despite the need for understanding and developing theories of disaster recovery, research on recovery is still in the early stages of development, and a comprehensive theory of sustainable recovery has yet to be formed (Smith and Wenger 2006). However, in order to develop an empirically based theory of recovery, it is necessary to first answer the question: What indicators can be used to measure recovery at the community level? A multi-method approach, combining content analysis and the Delphi method, was used to answer this question. First, an initial set of recovery indicators was developed through a content analysis of journal articles. Experts from a variety of disciplines were then asked to rate the level of importance of each indicator using the Delphi method through three questionnaires, where surveys 2 and 3 reported the median, minimum and maximum scores, along with any reasoning for rating selection, for the panel for each question. Consensus was achieved for several of the indicators while others showed wide disparities in ratings of importance. We report the results and discuss the reasoning for the results after discussing our points of departure and research