Collaborative Research: Social Networks and Mitigation in Areas of Chronic Disasters

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More than half the world's population, apprxomiately 3.4 billion people, live in disaster-prone areas, and many reside under chronically hazardous conditions. The question is not why people live in highly hazardous zones, but how do people deal with associated difficulties? In this collobarative research project, Dr. Arthur Murphy of the University of North Carolina Greensboro and Dr. Linda M. Whiteford and Dr. Graham A Tobin of the University of South Florida, ask whether personal networks composed of subgroups, and links between those subgroups, provide disaster victims with advantages not available to people with either more tightly connected or sparsely distributed networks. The study builds on prior research on chronic hazards, disasters and recovery. The research will focus on communities in southern Mexico exposed to an active volcano that regularly deposits ash across the landscape. Formal and semi-formal interview data on exposure, impact, risk-perception, well-being, and personal relationships will allow researchers to ascertain how differently structured networks constrain individual outcomes and well-being. Investigating network structures as potential strategies for decreasing the harmful effects of volcanoes poses a significant area of research and may help predict how well people respond to continual exposure to a hazard. Beyond disaster research, potential applications include community and international development, plus community resilience research. In addition, the methodological innovations proposed for this study, once tested, could be adapted to other social sciences, as well as applied to disaster mitigation and recovery efforts by outlining out how to strengthen networks that are already in existence.