Abstract
Disaster events and their economic impacts are trending, and climate projection studies suggest that the risks of disaster will continue to increase in the near future. Despite the broad and increasing social effects of these events, the empirical basis of disaster research is often weak, partially due to the natural paucity of observed data. At the same time, some of the early research regarding social responses to disasters have become outdated as social, cultural, and political norms have changed. The digital revolution, the open data trend, and the advancements in data science provide new opportunities for social science disaster research. We introduce the term computational social science of disasters (CSSD), which can be formally defined as the systematic study of the social behavioral dynamics of disasters utilizing computational methods. In this paper, we discuss and showcase the opportunities and the challenges in this new approach to disaster research. Following a brief review of the fields that relate to CSSD, namely traditional social sciences of disasters, computational social science, and crisis informatics, we examine how advances in Internet technologies offer a new lens through which to study disasters. By identifying gaps in the literature, we show how this new field could address ways to advance our understanding of the social and behavioral aspects of disasters in a digitally connected world. In doing so, our goal is to bridge the gap between data science and the social sciences of disasters in rapidly changing environments.
Highlights
The frequency of disasters is on the rise [1], and projections suggest the risk will increase in the future [2]
Just as sociology of disasters reflects the qualitative nature of sociological studies, the disaster research conducted by psychologists is mostly quantitative, as it is the common methodology in the field of psychology
We show how psychological research (Section 2.2) skews more towards quantitative data and is focused on the individuals and the theories applied to preparedness, health, planned behavior, and psychological impacts of disasters
Summary
The frequency of disasters is on the rise [1], and projections suggest the risk will increase in the future [2]. Researchers utilizing technological tools who are interested in expanding their work beyond the area of system design can shift their attention from the field of crisis informatics to computational social science (CSS: the study of social science through computational methods). In this domain, they can leverage additional themes and theoretical tools for studying social phenomena in disasters. With this approach, researchers can take advantage of the new opportunities in CSSD to advance a better understanding of social phenomena in disasters through a new set of research questions.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have