COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: RAPID: How decision-making about risk and interdependencies impact well-being: A baseline study of communities affected by Hurricane Harvey.

University Of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

The research supported by this award will develop comparative cases of disaster recovery outcomes to assess best strategies for fostering adaptive resilience in at-risk communities. All proposed sites are located in southeastern Texas and were affected by Hurricane Harvey. They include low-lying coastal and rural agricultural and ranching areas, towns around Beaumont exposed to petrochemicals and flooding, and core urban areas of Houston that were flooded and exposed to contaminated waste waters and industrial refuse. These sites were chosen to represent a range of socioeconomic statuses, ethnic compositions, livelihoods, and exposure risk. The project is innovative in adapting formal decision-making techniques from agricultural contexts to identify factors situated within stories of recovery experiences and overall wellbeing, especially related to risk and the many interdependent factors that produce decisions in the real world. The research will identify variations and similarities in the clusters of salient factors impinging on decisions in order to locate critical points in the recovery process that can support or create barriers to recovery and long term wellbeing. These will begin with the initial big decisions, such as whether or not to evacuate and will progress over the year as new choices arise. Findings from this research will contribute insights into the science of disaster recovery management in the United States, which can lead to more robust, humane, and sustainable recoveries. The researchers will employ a combination of anthropological qualitative and quantitative methods. Through interviews and participant observation, they will track pivotal moments and everyday life in survivor households, visiting ten households in each of six communities four times over twelve months. In addition to the ethnographic data collection, the investigators will carry out two quantitative household livelihood and well-being surveys at the beginning and the end of the study, and track changes in household and occupational finances. They will also collect biosocial data, including water quality testing to detect the presence or arrival of industrial pollutants, oil or gas residues, and unusual microbial activity. The sum of these household-level data will position this research to develop a series of decision-making models for different categories of choices made by individual survivors and scaled up to model decision-making made by communities, livelihood groups, and other categories of analysis such as class and ethnicity, over the course of the first year of recovery. The project will also provide field-based research experience for two graduate students.