The Social Consequences of Disasters: Individual and Community Change

Abstract

We review findings from the last decade of research on the effects of disasters, concentrating on three important themes: the differences between the recovery of places versus people, the need to differentiate between short- and long-term recovery trajectories, and the changing role of government and how it has exacerbated inequality in recovery and engendered feedback loops that create greater vulnerability. We reflect the focus of the majority of sociological studies on disasters by concentrating our review on studies in the United States, but we also include studies on disasters throughout the world if they contribute to our empirical and theoretical understanding of disasters and their impacts. We end with a discussion of the inevitability of more severe disasters as climate change progresses and call on social scientists to develop new concepts and to use new methods to study these developments.