Abstract
Understanding social resilience can assist in the formulation of disaster management policies to help communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. However, direct social resilience measurement methods such as household surveys are not always a practical option as they are a time- and resource-exhaustive process. Existing measures mainly utilize publicly available census data, which often provide a poor and outdated assessment of current social resilience status. Another limitation includes a failure to capture multiple facets of indicators that are process-oriented and dynamic in nature such as mobility of people. These challenges can be addressed by employing a surrogate approach. Surrogates are alternative measures to depict the target indicator. The surrogate approach can capture key facets of a target indicator, which can be used as potential measures for the target indicator. A framework to conceptualize the surrogate approach is presented, and operationalized using a case study approach on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka to identify surrogates to measure mobility of people as a resilience indicator. Six higher-order themes were identified as potential surrogates to measure mobility of people in a disaster context. The approach proposed to methodically identify potential surrogates and their measurement protocols can help to improve the current knowledge base and understanding of complex interrelationships of social resilience.
Highlights
The concept of ‘‘resilience’’ has been increasingly discussed in disaster studies, since the adoption of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNISDR 2015)
This study focused on the identification of key facets of mobility of people that can be used as potential surrogates
A framework to conceptualize the surrogate approach used in this research provides a novel method to measure social resilience indicators
Summary
The concept of ‘‘resilience’’ has been increasingly discussed in disaster studies, since the adoption of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNISDR 2015). Saja et al Surrogate Measures to Assess Mobility of People as a Resilience Indicator frameworks: (1) conceptual challenges in translating the complexity of resilience as a concept to practical measurement; (2) technical challenges in selecting and applying methods, or in using special measurement tools, such as data analysis; and (3) practical or logistical challenges in operationalizing a resilience measurement. A robust resilience measure should consider many different aspects of an indicator that includes the availability, functionality, accessibility, quality, and capacity of the resilience phenomenon being measured In this context, the ‘‘surrogate approach’’ can be used to identify different facets of an indicator and select the most important facets (potential surrogates) to address conceptual challenges by translating the abstract and complex concept into a practically applicable measure. The proposed surrogate conceptualization framework has wide applicability in any context to explore potential surrogates to assess resilience
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