Disaster research methods: Past progress and future directions

✍ Scribed by Fran H. Norris

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 133 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-9867
• DOI: 10.1002/jts.20109

✦ Synopsis

Published results for 225 disaster studies were coded on methodological variables, severity of effects, and event year. Methods varied greatly, but cross-sectional, after-only designs, convenience sampling, and small samples were modal. Samples that were assessed before the disaster, selected for reasons of convenience, or were large tended to show less severe effects than other samples. Developing countries were underrepresented overall, but not in recent years. Certain desirable study characteristics (longitudinal designs, representative samples) have been decreasing in prevalence over time, whereas others (early first assessment) have been increasing. Innovations such as latent trajectory modeling or hierarchical linear modeling might advance the field's ability to capture the complexity of disasters, but the field still needs to attend to the fundamentals of sound epidemiologic research.

Regardless of whether they are natural in origin or human-caused, disasters are extremely complex events. Disasters generate an array of individually and collectively experienced stressors of varying degrees of intensity that interact with multiple characteristics of the person and environment to produce diverse outcomes that evolve over time. Although we may speak of disasters abstractly, specific studies are designed to capture the effects of a particular event on a particular population at a particular time. Thus, the elements of time and population are fundamental to the research plan and may serve to organize the primary methodological challenges that disaster researchers face. Time, of course, is a critical variable in disaster research. The aftermath of a disaster is a motion picture, its effects a moving target. Answering important questions about onset and duration of effects can be exceptionally challenging for