Schedule for the DRC REU program

Pictures REU 2005

Group vs. Non-Group Response to Tornado Warnings:

Researchers at the DRC recently conducted fieldwork as part of a broader project on public response to tornado warnings. As a result, data were collected both at the individual and household level, offering interested researchers the opportunity to focus on public response to tornado warnings. There are many important questions to ask in this area. For example, was the decision to seek shelter a group or individual decision? How did being in a group at the time of the warning shape the reception and interpretation of risk information? To what degree do power and authority play a role when one enters into a collective process of warning response?

Warning Response Analysis:

For this project, the student will undertake a more general study of the warning process. When were people most likely to receive warnings? Why and under what conditions did they receive them? How did they receive them? To what degree does a person’s trust in institutions shape her/his warning response process? What are the primary factors that influence public response to disaster warnings? Students wishing to learn more about qualitative research in the social sciences will be given the opportunity to apply content analysis, grounded theory, and state-of-the-art computer programs (i.e., through the use of the Atlas analytic program) in their research projects.

Housing and Katrina:

Following Hurricane Katrina, quick response data was collected in the form of qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys on whether evacuees intended to return to Louisiana (primarily New Orleans) or relocate elsewhere (primarily Houston). This project seeks to explore the initial perceptions of evacuees in an effort to determine their long-term housing intentions utilizing qualitative and/or quantitative data.

Gender and Katrina:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a tremendous amount of research has been conducted on the intersections of race and class with respect to both warning response and evacuation: Who evacuated early and why? Who ended up in mass shelters and why? Did the victims’ race and/or class influence the timing and type of resources made available? However, very little research has focused on issues of gender in response to and during the aftermath of Katrina. This project seeks to explore whether gender issues were equally salient for victims of this extremely disruptive hurricane. Both qualitative data (interviews with evacuees in Houston) and quantitative data (surveys completed with evacuees in Houston) are available to address several gender issues.

Evacuation and Katrina:

Following Hurricane Katrina, quick response data was collected in the form of qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys on the evacuation process, specifically among those who were sent to mass shelters in Houston. Students could investigate questions about the evacuation experiences of those victims in Houston’s Reliant Park shelters.

Looting and Hurricane Katrina:

In the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina, a number of media reports emerging from New Orleans proper and other southeastern Louisiana parishes that were severely affected by the hurricane’s winds and tidal flooding made extensive references to reports of looting. In fact, the volume and persistence of media reports of looting and other types of anti-social behavior was unparalleled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Using newspapers collected by the Disaster Research Center from a number of local and national newspapers between August 29th - December 1st 2005, students can examine the print news media’s reporting of looting to answer questions/issues such as: whether or not reports of looting differed by location. For example, were there more claims of looting made in New Orleans than in the surrounding Louisiana parishes or than in cities in Mississippi; or did looting reports in the aftermath of Katrina differ from reports of looting in Hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne in 2004?

The Establishment of Perimeters in Disaster Response:

During the post-impact phase of a disaster, an influx of individuals—such as formal emergency responders (e.g., fire fighters, police, and search and rescue teams) as well as less trained, less knowledgeable informal volunteers (e.g., everyday citizens)—often converge on the disaster site. Studies have shown the importance of informal volunteers in saving victims immediately after a disaster event. However, the majority of such activities in disaster response situations (e.g., search and rescue in structural collapse) are still assigned to formal organizations. In light of recent human-induced (i.e., terrorist) disaster events (e.g., the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon), the need for well-secured areas permitting organized responders to save lives is a pressing reality. As our nation becomes more concerned with security, it would benefit emergency response planners to understand the components of how a perimeter (to ensure both security and safety) develops. This proposed project would examine the social aspects of how, when and why perimeters have been developed in a variety of deployments within the recent history of FEMA’s Urban Search-and-Rescue (USAR) program to determine how security perimeters affect the legitimacy of on-scene responders and what obstacles impede voluntary efforts to rescue victims. A large number of transcribed interviews with USAR team members as well as other responders to the WTC disaster are available for analysis.

Business Recovery and Disasters:

When the private sector is so damaged and disrupted by a disaster that people no longer have jobs and cannot bring money into their households, it is impossible for communities to recover, to return to any type of normalcy. But what makes it possible for some businesses to be more resilient, to get back into operation more quickly so they can put people back to work? Surprisingly, very little research has been done on this very important question. DRC, however, collected survey data on hundreds of businesses several years after Hurricane Andrew struck Dade County, Florida and the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck Santa Cruz County, California. Using these two quantitative data sets, students can address several questions about business (and community) resiliency including: What types of businesses (e.g., those with large or small numbers of employees; those that own or lease their business property; those whose primary marketing area is local, regional, national or global; those that produce goods or those that provide services; those that have invested in disaster preparedness and mitigation or those that rely on community response systems) are better able to “bounce back” quickly? Are businesses that take advantage of post-disaster loans and other services able to recover more quickly and completely than those that do not?