Citation

Bourque LB, Shoaf KI, Nguyen LH. Int. J. Mass Emerg. Disasters 1997; 15(1): 71-101.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, International Sociological Association, International Research Committee on Disasters)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We examine the kinds of information that can be obtained from well-designed, standardized, population-based surveys and demonstrate that some things which, in the past, have been considered barriers to the use of surveys following disasters provide insights into post-disaster behavior and may be advantageous. In specific, we examine: the use of standardized surveys to compare community behavior across time, events, and locations; the extent to which surveys represent the population of interest in the aftermath of a disaster; the receptivity of respondents to being interviewed after a disaster; the ability to utilize telephones for interviews after a disaster; the extent to which the data collected in a survey are perishable and subject to memory decay; the use of surveys as quasi-experimental designs for obtaining information on "control groups"; the use of surveys as a source of baseline or denominator data for ascertaining what other, more specialized datasets represent; the maintenance of verbal data collected within the context of a survey for later post-coding and analysis; and the storage of surveys in archives for use in secondary analyses by other researchers. Overall, we conclude that well-designed, standardized, population-based surveys can provide an accurate picture of a community's behaviors and attitudes with regard to disasters as well as describe the impact of a disaster on a population.