Disaster and Emergency Management Methods

Social Science Approaches in Application

Jason D. Rivera, Jason D. Rivera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

Find the answers to disaster and emergency management research questions with Disaster and Emergency Management Methods. Written to engage students and to provide a flexible foundation for instructors and practitioners, this interdisciplinary textbook provides a holistic understanding of disaster and emergency management research methods used in the field.

The disaster and emergency management contexts have a host of challenges that affect the research process that subsequently shape methodological approaches, data quality, analysis and inferences. In this book, readers are presented with the considerations that must be made before engaging in the research process, in addition to a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches that are currently being used in the discipline. Current, relevant, and fascinating real-world applications provide a window into how each approach is being applied in the field.

Disaster and Emergency Management Methods serves as an effective way to empower readers to approach their own study of disaster and emergency management research methods with confidence.

PART I

Preliminary Considerations of Disaster and Emergency Management Research

CHAPTER 1

Practical Considerations for Ethical Research in Post-disaster Communities

Frances L. Edwards

Introduction

Disaster field research design requires determining methodologies that will best collect and analyze data regarding the events and their impacts on human subjects and the natural environment. Research must consider the ethical standards that will impact the designs that are used and how they are implemented in the field. University institutional review boards (IRB)¹ enforce general norms of research in the behavioral sciences involving human subjects as articulated by the Nuremberg Code (NIH, 2016) and Belmont Report (HHS.gov, 2016). Ethical considerations for field research require the rigorous application of these norms.

Why Do Disaster Field Research?

Field research on disaster events has to be conducted as soon as possible after the event to capture the experiences of the survivors, responders, and observers while memories are fresh (Browne & Peek, 2014). Social science researchers have discovered that memories of disasters last only for a relatively brief time, no more than a decade (Economist, 2019). Yet, “collective memory is of more than just academic interest, precisely because resilience to future calamities is thought to depend on it” (Economist, 2019, p. 70). A field experiment by Fanta, Salek, and Sklenicka (2019) found that for over 1,000 years, people living in a flood prone area of Central Europe only remained away from the shoreline for one generation after a catastrophic flood, and then gradually moved back to the riverbank, only to relocate the community after the next catastrophic flood. They conclude that “living memory is apparently conditioned by the life span of the eye-witnesses…. However, once the eye-witnesses die out, the community forgets the consequences of such a disaster” (p. 6).

Fanta et al.’s (2019) findings validate the importance of rapid-response field research for influencing the resilience of future generations. Moreover, simple chronicles of the disaster will not impact community resilience decisions, as shown in their Central European river basin study (Economist, 2019). Rather, it must be a dynamic record of eyewitness experiences that is compelling and “not able to be downplayed”; “it is essential to keep reminding people of the extent of these events” (p. 6), a role played by effective field research reports.

As such, the goals of disaster field research are to:

• Improve the understanding of the impact of hazards on individuals, families, and communities;
• Bear witness to the event to influence people at risk in other areas, policymakers, and future generations to engage in prevention, protection, and mitigation activities; and
• Improve public policy regarding disaster preparedness and mitigation to prevent future disasters or lessen their impacts on the human community and environment for events that cannot be prevented.

Understanding Hazards

Hazards that lead to disasters can be categorized in a number of ways, but the most conventional is to describe them as natural hazards, technological hazards, or intentional human-caused hazards (FEMA, 2010). Table 1.1 lists the most common events in each category, although many other events might be viewed as hazards as well.

Table 1.1 Types of Hazards

Natural	Technological	Human-Caused
Rain/lightning/hail	Power outage	Medical emergency (e.g., heart attack)
Flood	Hazmat release	Industrial accident
■ Levee failure	Water system failure	Arson
Urban wildland/interface fire	Transportation accident (road, rail, air)	Urban fire/conflagration
Earthquake	Gas pipeline failure/explosion	Workplace violence
■ Shaking		Mass shooting
■ Landslides		Terrorist attack (guns)
■ Liquefaction		Terrorist attack (vehicles)
Tsunami/tidal surge		Terrorist attack (using chemicals)
Wind/tornado		Terrorist attack (using biological material)
Snow/ice/avalanche		Terrorist attack (using radiological materials)
Monsoons/hurricanes/storm surge		Terrorist attack (using explosives)
Heatwave
Pandemic

Source: Adapted from Edwards & Goodrich (2012).

Understanding human behavior during and in response to past disasters is critical for changing people’s future behavior and building resilience (Fanta et al., 2019). Multiple factors make this knowledge increasingly important. For example, more people live in harm’s way than ever before (NOAA, 2018). Moreover, 40% of the world’s population lived within 100 kilometers of the coast a decade ago (Columbia University, 2006). Thus, sea level rise and cyclones (hurricanes, monsoons, and typhoons) will cause harm to more individuals and communities, increasing loss of life and economic damage.

Climate change and sea level rise make coastal living increasingly dangerous. A 2018 NASA study found that the sea level is likely to rise 26 feet by 2100 due to the expansion of warmer water and the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic (Weeman & Lynch, 2018), bringing the ocean’s edge closer to the built environment. Sea level rise exacerbates storm surge, which caused $65 billion in damages from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Other studies show that climate change is creating higher-intensity hurricanes, with a 2%–11% increase in wind speeds and a 20% increase in precipitation, which caused most of the damage during 2017’s Hurricane Harvey (C2ES, n.d.).

Additionally, earthquake faults are found near many populous areas of the world. Scientists have determined that the Earth is made up of at least 12 tectonic plates that move against each other. “As the plates move, they may get stuck beneath the earth’s surface. When the pressure has built up sufficiently, the subterranean rock breaks, causing an earthquake” (Edwards et al., 2015, p. 10). Many populous areas are affected by active tectonic plate movement, including most of the United States, western Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, El Salvador, Chile, the Caribbean, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, China, and Japan. Earthquakes are cyclical and generally predictable only within a framework of decades, or within a few seconds of initial rupture (Edwards et al., 2015).

Generally, hazardous events can be understood in a variety of ways. They may be predicted or cyclical emergencies, they may escalate in scale and impact, or they may become landscape-level catastrophes that cascade into additional impacts. A winter ice storm might begin as an emergency in a single community, but as the storm becomes regional it may be perceived as a disaster due to the number of people affected and the financial value of the damage to the natural and built environment. As it persists, it may become a catastrophe as regional power outages occur from ice on the lines, vehicle accidents are generated by ice on the roads, and water pipes freeze and break, which lead to increased human impacts, environmental damage, and escalating costs.

Disaster researchers see value in getting to the site of an event and doing research to understand how the disaster escalated, how technological systems fared, and how and why humans were impacted at such a scale. Researchers want to understand what mitigation measures had been taken for the infrastructure, what preparedness measures were taken by community members, and how first responders planned and exercised for such an event. Some questions they attempt to answer include “What plans and systems failed?”; “What elements of the response were inadequate?”; “Was the event unpredicted, or unpredictable, or was the magnitude unanticipated?”; “Did individuals, schools, hospitals, churches, non-governmental organizations, small businesses and other community members have emergency response plans for this event?”; and even “Did they implement the plans, and were they effective in mitigating losses?”

To answer these questions effectively, disaster field researchers must interview those who experienced the disaster to see how events unfolded, what the people involved perceived about the event, and how community leaders and responders understand their roles in the response and resolution. Framing and engaging in these conversations require researchers to apply ethical standards to the development of the interview, timing, sampling of respondents, the format and venues that will be used, and the questions themselves. Along these lines, the federal Common Rule (45 C.F.R. pt. 46) regulates the conduct of research using human subjects in the United States. It provides protections for participants in disaster field research, recognizing that they “contribute their time and assume risk to advance the research enterprise, which benefits society at large” (Federal Register, 2017, p. 7149). Publications such as SAMHSA’s Challenges and Considerations in Disaster Research (2016) detail the purpose and application of disaster field research to a subset of activities, such as mental health services.² Moreover, Quarantelli (1997) lays out one of the earliest models and set of goals for disaster fieldwork in natural and technological events. Specifically, one goal is to understand the conditions, characteristics, consequences, and “careers” of disasters; however, “At another level, the goal was to further sociological understanding of emergent groups and organizational behavior” (Quarantelli, 1997, p. 5).

To achieve these goals, the disaster researcher must go to the impacted area soon after the event, while memories are fresh. Fieldwork in the post-disaster setting involves interviewing people “who have experienced severe loss and trauma” (Mukherji, Ganapati, & Rahill, 2014, p. 821). This also means that those memories will be painful for many interviewees, and the interview or focus group may cause the survivors to relive their traumas, creating some risk of psychological harm from post-traumatic stress disorder (Collogan, Tuma, Dolan-Sewell, Borja, & Fleishman, 2004), which is experienced by 22%–50% of disaster survivors (Canino, Bravo, Rubio-Stipec, & Woodbury, 1990; Richards, 2001). Thus, the application of the ethical standards of the Nuremberg Code and Belmont Report is crucial for all disaster field research with human subjects.

Regulatory Framework for Ethical Disaster Field Research

To ensure that all research is conducted ethically, researchers receiving federal support must submit plans for their work for review by other scholars through a governing body, known as the institutional review board (45 C.F.R. § 46.103). Disaster field researchers are generally required to take training on the concept of ethical research, which includes a review of the protocols and norms that guide research using human subjects. Additionally, they are required to complete a course and pass a test to demonstrate their understanding of the ethical structures in which they will work. To facilitate this regulation, the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) is one example of an organization that provides the mandatory training for scholars overseeing research (the principal investigator on a project) and researchers conducting any human subjects-based field research (CITI, n.d.).

The primary standard that provides ethical guidance for human subjects research is the Nuremberg Code of 1949 (NIH, 2016; see Box 1.1). Following the medical experiments that were conducted on prisoners during World War II and the Nuremberg trials tha...