NSF Award
1760484
In late August 2017, Hurricane Harvey became the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States in over a decade, wreaking havoc on Texas's coastal communities. This project researches how Texas residents who encountered the threat of the hurricane and its aftermath made decisions about how they would prepare for and respond to it. This project advances core missions of the National Science Foundation. This project does "promote the progress of science" by examining the human dimensions of disasters and is one of the only studies poised to gain insights from the same individuals shortly before and after a disaster. This project does "advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare" by providing insights into how disasters affect peoples' decision making and well-being and thereby informs policies to mitigate adverse effects. <br/><br/>This research project extends an existing telephone survey administered originally to Gulf Coast residents in 2016 to investigate a range of health, social, and economic factors related to individual and community disaster resilience. The researchers re-contact respondents in Texas to collect a second wave of data that captures longitudinal evidence regarding the impact of Hurricane Harvey on risk perceptions as well as decision making about how to ameliorate post-disaster adversities. In the second wave of data collection, the research team combines questions from the original Wave 1 survey with new questions assessing people's hurricane preparations before Harvey, their exposures during Harvey, and their experiences immediately thereafter. In addition, data from both waves of the survey are merged with county-level variables that provide objective measures of hurricane exposure. Poised with both pre-and post-event data from the same individuals, the researchers pursue analyses to better understand behavioral, attitudinal, and other changes pre- to post-Hurricane Harvey. These analyses are a marked improvement from past research that typically has no baseline measures. Specifically, the team tests three hypotheses: (1) adverse outcomes are caused by increased exposure to the hurricane; (2) pre-hurricane conditions can amplify or suppress the effect of hurricane exposure on outcomes; and (3) specific subgroups are at increased risk of adverse outcomes in the wake of a disaster. The research addresses important limitations of prior studies in the domain of natural hazards in at least two ways:(1) by focusing on the human dimensions of disasters, particularly relating to issues beyond emergency response, and (2) by providing longitudinal data on how risk perceptions or other human experiences change in response to a disaster and how, consequently, people engage or do not engage in mitigation behaviors. The work will help to develop a realistic understanding of how people make decisions about hazards that affect the health, the well-being of communities, and the economy. Research that helps us better understand human disaster-related behavior may also inform policy debates about how best to build community resilience in the face of chronic exposure to trauma and stress.
