Comparative Analysis of Public’s and Decision-Makers’ Perspectives on Socioeconomic Barriers Causing Delay in Post-Disaster Recovery Processes

Abstract

Natural disasters occur frequently in the U.S. and yield significant damages to communities. Decision-makers must understand the perspectives and inputs of the people of the community in order to facilitate resiliency and effectively serve and comfort them in a timely manner. Within recent years, a variety aspects of post-disaster recovery process have been studied, through which several indicators were determined. This research aimed to identify, validate, and analyze socioeconomic barriers that cause delays in the post-disaster recovery, based on public and expert input. To achieve these objectives, a comprehensive review of more than 300 scholarly papers and other relative documents was performed to identify the potential socioeconomic post-disaster recovery barriers (PDRBs). Two surveys, based on the potential barriers, were developed and distributed to subject matter experts (SMEs) and the public. Various statistical methods were used to analyze the collected data. The surveys were completed by 239 participants, 44 of which were SMEs. Such a comparative analysis has been rarely conducted, despite its importance to achieving an understanding of how socioeconomic barriers delay the post-disaster recovery processes. The findings indicated that, the biggest difference in the perspectives of SMEs and public was related to lack of family or friends who can help emotionally, while, lack of a community that looks out for each other was awarded the second highest difference level. In addition, testing the significance of the PDRBs using the public and SMEs sample input it was concluded that the expectations of the two groups were different and the extension of the significance was different comparing the two groups’ overview. The findings in this research would assist decision-makers in establishing effective post-disaster recovery practices and constructive relationships with the public that are aimed towards a more efficient recovery.