RAPID: Emergence of ethnic social network and disaster resilience

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Hurricane Harvey was catastrophic and extremely destructive and it presented unprecedented challenges for disaster relief, recovery, and rebuild. Numerous studies have examined the crisis management and disaster recovery support paradigm. Most of these research efforts, however, have focused on time critical information sharing among emergency service providers. In contrast, social support groups that are formed organically through grassroots efforts take advantage of the interactive nature of social media and allow their users to actively engage in two-way or multi-way conversations, post comments and reactions, which may serve to offer opportunities for correction of low-quality information. This project advances understanding of risk communication by incorporating social capital theories in the context of an ongoing risk event, which allows the assessment of risk perceptions as they are being formed and risk communication behaviors in motion.This research focuses on the Chinese American community in Houston, who were united through the popular social media platform WeChat. The project, inspired by stories from victims with first-hand experience with Harvey, examines this burgeoning ethnic network and how it contributes to disaster resilience, which is defined as the sustained ability of a community to withstand and recover from adversity. Buttressed by existing online and offline social networks, the entire community's disaster resilience improved because ordinary citizens were able to receive useful information and other social support directly and efficiently, when access to emergency service providers and government agencies was disrupted. Although focusing on one particular ethnic group may appear microscopic, this case study will offer broader implications for other communities bounded by a shared geographic location. RAPID Specifically, the goal of the proposed research is to conduct a survey among Chinese American WeChat users to 1) assess attributes of individuals, including their psychological attributes such as hazard experience and risk perception, as well as demographic attributes such as incomes, occupation, and education; 2) gather relational data, such as contacts, ties and connections, and group attachments and embeddedness into the local community; 3) identify key opinion leaders and map out effective pathways for the dissemination of relief/recovery information. The research objectives are to determine (1) the network structures of existing support groups, both online and offline, and track their development and evolvement during the immediate recovery periods post-Harvey; (2) the demographic and psychographic attributes that denote key opinion leaders in these networks; and, (3) the most valuable information sources and pathways of information sharing that improve disaster resilience in the local community. The data collection entails a survey among Chinese American residents of the metropolitan Houston area who use the social media application WeChat. With an estimated margin of error at ±4%, 95% confidence level, the sample size needed is 590 to provide good representation of the Chinese American population in Houston, approximately 33,000.