Social Science Research Community Research Articles

Towards integration? Considering social aspects with large-scale computational models for nature-based solutions

Abstract Non-Technical Summary Information on social aspects of climate change intervention, such as behavioral choices and public acceptance, are often not included in global climate models. As a result, they have been critiqued for not adequately reflecting ‘real world’ conditions. At the same time, these models are important and influential policy tools. To improve these models, calls are being made for more interaction – or integration – between the social science and modelling research communities. Yet, it remains unclear how to achieve this. Responding to this gap, we explore what kind of integration is currently taking place, how, and opportunities for further development. Technical Summary The importance of social drivers of climate change interventions, or social aspects, is currently underrepresented in computational modelling projections. These parameters are largely excluded from estimates of technical mitigation potential, feasibility, and tools like integrated assessment models (IAMs) and other large-scale models that influence the development of climate policies and notable bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This paper contributes to calls being made within the research community to address this gap and strengthen linkages between modelling practices and social science insights. Using nature-based solutions (NbS) as a framing, we present the results of a critical literature review and interviews with multidisciplinary experts reflecting on the current state of integration around IAMs and opportunities to better capture social aspects within large-scale modelling processes. Our findings confirm the need to incorporate social aspects in IAMs, but highlight that how this happens in practice may depend on context, project objectives, or pragmatic choices rather than conceptual notions about what ‘good’ integration is. Nevertheless, some integration strategies are better than others, and concerns about data limitations and low capacity of the IAM community for engaging in integration can be overcome with sufficient support and complementary efforts from the broader research community. Social Media Summary Integrating social aspects in large-scale models requires complementary efforts from the broader research community.

Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data

At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk concluded his acquisition of Twitter. In the weeks and months before that, several questions were publicly discussed that were not only of interest to the platform's future buyers, but also of high relevance to the Computational Social Science research community. For example, how many active users does the platform have? What percentage of accounts on the site are bots? And, what are the dominating topics and sub-topical spheres on the platform? In a globally coordinated effort of 80 scholars to shed light on these questions, and to offer a dataset that will equip other researchers to do the same, we have collected all 375 million tweets published within a 24-hour time period starting on September 21, 2022. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete 24-hour Twitter dataset that is available for the research community. With it, the present work aims to accomplish two goals. First, we seek to answer the aforementioned questions and provide descriptive metrics about Twitter that can serve as references for other researchers. Second, we create a baseline dataset for future research that can be used to study the potential impact of the platform's ownership change.

Twitter spam and false accounts prevalence, detection, and characterization: A survey

The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a (non-comprehensive) survey of research efforts aimed at estimating the prevalence of spam and false accounts on Twitter, as well as characterizing their use, activity, and behavior. I propose a taxonomy of spam and false accounts, enumerating known techniques used to create and detect them. Then, I summarize studies estimating the prevalence of spam and false accounts on Twitter. Finally, I report on research that illustrates how spam and false accounts are used for scams and frauds, stock market manipulation, political disinformation and deception, conspiracy amplification, coordinated influence, public health misinformation campaigns, radical propaganda and recruitment, and more. I will conclude with a set of recommendations aimed at charting the path forward to combat these problems.

Development and expansion in the marine social sciences: Insights from the global community

SummaryThe importance of understanding the complexities of societal relationships with our global ocean, and how these influence sustainable management and effective, equitable governance, is crucial to addressing ocean challenges. Using established horizon scanning method, this paper explores current trends in marine social sciences through a survey of the global marine social science research and practitioner community (n = 106). We find that marine social sciences research is broad, covering themes relating to governance and decision-making, stakeholder participation and engagement, the socio-cultural dimensions of marine systems, ocean literacy, community-based and area-specific management, and the blue economy, and identify future research priorities highlighted by the community. Our results, however, suggest several barriers persist, including the relationship between marine social sciences and other disciplines, and the visibility and recognition of marine social sciences both internal and external to academia. Finally, the paper generates prospective thinking and highlights recommendations for future research and practice.

Towards codes of practice for navigating the academic peer review process

Peer review is the bedrock of modern academic research and its lasting contributions to science and society. And yet, reviewers can submit “poor” peer review reports, authors can blatantly ignore referee advice, and editors can contravene and undermine the peer review process itself. In this paper, we, the Editors of Energy Research & Social Science (ER&SS), seek to establish peer review codes of practice for the general energy and social science research community. We include suggestions for three of the most important roles: peer reviewers or referees, editors, and authors. We base our 33 recommendations on a collective 60 years of editorial experience at ER&SS. Our hope is that such codes of practice can enable the academic community to navigate the peer review process more effectively, more meaningfully, and more efficiently.

From cohort to community: The emotional work of birthday cards in the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, 1946-2018.

The Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) is Britain’s longest-running birth cohort study. From their birth in 1946 until the present day, its research participants, or study members, have filled out questionnaires and completed cognitive or physical examinations every few years. Among other outcomes, the findings of these studies have framed how we understand health inequalities. Throughout the decades and multiple follow-up studies, each year the study members have received a birthday card from the survey staff. Although the birthday cards were originally produced in 1962 as a method to record changes of address at a time when the adolescent study members were potentially leaving school and home, they have become more than that with time. The cards mark, and have helped create, an ongoing evolving relationship between the NSHD and the surveyed study members, eventually coming to represent a relationship between the study members themselves. This article uses the birthday cards alongside archival material from the NSHD and oral history interviews with survey staff to trace the history of the growing awareness of importance of emotion within British social science research communities over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It documents changing attitudes to science’s dependence on research participants, their well-being, and the collaborative nature of scientific research. The article deploys an intertextual approach to reading these texts alongside an attention to emotional communities drawing on the work of Barbara Rosenwein.

#Election2020: the first public Twitter dataset on the 2020 US Presidential election

Credible evidence-based political discourse is a critical pillar of democracy and is at the core of guaranteeing free and fair elections. The study of online chatter is paramount, especially in the wake of important voting events like the recent November 3, 2020 U.S. Presidential election and the inauguration on January 21, 2021. Limited access to social media data is often the primary obstacle that limits our abilities to study and understand online political discourse. To mitigate this impediment and empower the Computational Social Science research community, we are publicly releasing a massive-scale, longitudinal dataset of U.S. politics- and election-related tweets. This multilingual dataset encompasses over 1.2 billion tweets and tracks all salient U.S. political trends, actors, and events from 2019 to the time of this writing. It predates and spans the entire period of the Republican and Democratic primaries, with real-time tracking of all presidential contenders on both sides of the aisle. The dataset also focuses on presidential and vice-presidential candidates, the presidential elections and the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Our dataset release is curated, documented, and will continue to track relevant events. We hope that the academic community, computational journalists, and research practitioners alike will all take advantage of our dataset to study relevant scientific and social issues, including problems like misinformation, information manipulation, conspiracies, and the distortion of online political discourse that has been prevalent in the context of recent election events in the United States. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/echen102/us-pres-elections-2020.

Development and Expansion in the Marine Social Sciences: Insights from the Global Community

Increasing recognition of the human dimensions of climate change, pollution, exploitation, and other threats to the marine environment has resulted in an expansion of marine social science research in recent years. The importance of understanding the complexities of societal relationships with our global ocean, seas and coasts, and how this might influence sustainable management and effective and equitable governance, will be crucial to address the challenges facing our marine systems. Given their growing importance, this paper seeks to undertake a global assessment of the current status and trends in marine social science research and outline the next steps and key directions for the field. Specifically, by adapting established horizon scanning methods, we conduct a survey of the global marine social science research and practitioner community. We find that current research within the marine social sciences is broad, and focused on themes relating to (but not limited to) governance and decision-making, stakeholder participation and engagement, the socio-cultural dimensions of marine systems, ocean literacy, community-based and area-specific management, and the blue economy. We also identify priorities for future research, for example, relating to aspects of social justice, welfare and equity in relation to the use and governance of marine systems, blue growth and the expansion of marine industries, and enhancing ocean literacy to build ocean stewardship and citizenship. Our results, however, suggest several barriers that may prevent the extent to which the marine social sciences can continue to expand and develop in these directions. Barriers include, but are not limited to, the relationship between marine social sciences and other disciplines (i.e. lack of acceptance of marine social science as a legitimate discipline) and the visibility and recognition of marine social science both internal and external to academia (e.g. by policy-makers and practitioners). Finally, we identify a series of enablers for overcoming the barriers identified (e.g. promoting marine social sciences, engaging stakeholders and enlisting champions and building interdisciplinary teams). In doing so, this paper generates prospective thinking and highlights recommendations for effective marine social science research and practice, as well as the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration into the future.

Marine social sciences: Looking towards a sustainable future

Marine and coastal environments provide extensive and essential ecosystem services upon which much of humanity relies, yet the incorporation of human dimensions into marine and coastal policy and management has historically been lacking. As efforts to address the substantial and diverse challenges facing marine and coastal environments continue, recent years have seen a growing call for greater consideration of people, how they interact with the marine environment, and the resultant implications for developing effective policy and management. Indeed, in recent times recognition of the importance of marine social science research, data, evidence and expertise has undergone an upward trajectory. Despite this growing level of awareness of the value of social science to the wider marine and coastal management agenda, effective and meaningful inclusion of marine social science into research and practice has remained a challenge. Here we approach this global challenge as an opportunity to bring the community together to set a forward-looking international research agenda, recognising the role of multiple approaches and diverse methods understanding the relationship between society and the sea, galvanising the research and practice community across marine social sciences and beyond. Furthermore, by bringing together this increasingly active community, we can identify mechanisms of change and pathways to enable inclusion of marine social sciences within global ocean policy. This paper draws on the views of researchers and practitioners from across the marine social science disciplines, brought together through an expert workshop held at the MARE 2019 conference (June 2019) and representing a range of geographical regions and perspectives. Through the workshop, delegates identified a number of priorities for the ongoing development of the marine social science community, including the need to improve capacity for marine social science research globally, the importance of nurturing an inclusive and equitable marine social science research community and the role of networks to continue to raise the profile of marine social science data and evidence for global ocean policy and management. Additionally, the discussions provided valuable insight into existing knowledge gaps and potential research priorities for the future. Finally, the paper presents a future vision and recommendations for an international and interdisciplinary marine social science agenda, calling for collaborative and strategic thinking on marine social sciences from across the marine science and policy interface. Critically, we show how social science needs to be embedded in all aspects of marine and coastal management in order to create truly sustainable solutions to the pervasive environmental challenges we face.

Research Methodology and Community Participation: A Decade of Indigenous Social Science Research in Canada.

Those engaged in community-based participatory research often comment on tensions between social scientific and community values, yet little systematic evidence exists about the relationship between social science research methodologies and community participation. We analyze nearly 500 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2015 on Indigenous issues in Canada, where policies encourage participatory research methods with disempowered groups. We find that research that includes Indigenous participation is more likely to include Indigenous epistemologies and participatory evidence sources and analysis methods. We also find that peer-reviewed research involving Indigenous participants often fails to go beyond minimum levels of consultation required by policies.

“I dream of a better future to help my mother, to give her back all she gave to me…”: social mobility projects, the family and other det

The migration of children has caught the attention of the social science research community in recent years. The institutional treatment of unaccompanied children in European host societies has been widely discussed as it concerns a social actor combining several legal profiles: that of an unprotected child and that of an irregular migrant. This paper aims at presenting the results of the research work conducted between 2010 et 2015 with unaccompanied children fostered in the child protection services system of the Autonomous Community of Galicia in Spain. By applying a combined methodology and a multi-site ethnographical field survey, the study has drawn upon different members of children’s kinship networks and key informants to discover the pre-migration determinants and relational processes that are involved in children's migration projects. The study reveals how the combined effects of different social actors and public policies influence and determine the framing and results of a child’s migration process, normally leading to segmented incorporation within the host society.

UNDERSTANDING THE GENRE FEATURES OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: A CASE STUDY

Some researchers’ prejudiced attitude on qualitative research as non-scientific research seems to hinder the development of qualitative research in some Asian social science research communities. Nevertheless, the present study on a qualitative novice’s writing process found that the lowly formulaic style of qualitative research writing could be another reason that impedes such development as well. Novice researchers’ writing tends to follow model-imitation, which contradicts the lowly formulaic style of qualitative research writing. With the employment of a social approach on writing studies as the theoretical framework, this study treated academic writing as an activity influenced by the writer’s situated research community. The writer’s varied research attempts in thesis writing process such as the formulation of research questions, employment of research methods, interpretation of research results, and the like, were treated as his/her composing acts. By longitudinally observing one graduate student’s use of qualitative research in his thesis proposal writing process, the present study discussed the multifaceted nature of qualitative research and the need of teaching/learning qualitative research as a specific genre in academic writing. Related genre elements to be included in teaching qualitative research are addressed.

Catastrophic Climate Risk and Brazilian Amazonian Politics and Policies: A New Research Agenda

Climate and deforestation impacts are jeopardizing the resilience of the Amazon rainforest, one of the key elements in the Earth’s climate system whose dieback may trigger catastrophic climate change. The potential degree of climate risk that the planet is facing, and current Brazilian Amazonian politics and policies, make it alarmingly conceivable that a tipping point will be crossed that leads to savannization of the forest. However, the social science research community has not yet acknowledged this possibility. A timely revision of the research agenda is needed to address this gap.

On cyberbullying incidents and underlying online social relationships

Cyberbullying is an important social challenge that takes place over a technical substrate. Thus, it has attracted research interest across both computational and social science research communities. While the social science studies conducted via careful participant selection have shown the effect of personality, social relationships, and psychological factors on cyberbullying, they are often limited in scale due to manual survey or ethnographic study components. Computational approaches on the other hand have defined multiple automated approaches for detecting cyberbullying at scale, and have largely focused only on the textual content of the messages exchanged. There are no existing efforts aimed at testing, validating, and potentially refining the findings from traditional bullying literature as obtained via surveys and ethnographic studies at scale over online environments. By analyzing the social relationship graph between users in an online social network and deriving features such as out-degree centrality and the number of common friends, we find that multiple social characteristics are statistically different between the cyberbullying and non-bullying groups, thus supporting many, but not all, of the results found in previous survey-based bullying studies. The results pave way for better understanding of the cyberbullying phenomena at scale.

On the Sustainability of Co-Authoring Behaviors in Vietnamese Social Sciences: A Preliminary Analysis of Network Data

The topic of sustainability has mostly been tied to economic development and environmental protection, yet not much attention has been paid to the need for high problem-solving capacity as this underlines both issues. One of the most straightforward ways to improve problem-solving capacity is to nurture ‘productive and enduring’, i.e., sustainable, scientific communities. The study examines the co-authoring behaviors of 412 Vietnamese social scientists over the 2008–2017 period via social network analysis to determine if these researchers have formed sustainable scientific communities, using Scopus data. The dataset provides an insightful look into the predominant form of collaboration, i.e., co-authorship, within the Vietnamese social science research communities. Through basic network metrics such as density and clustering coefficient, the study hypothesizes that the socially sustainable research communities are those with low clustering and high density. As any scholar's position in a network can be specified by three quantities: the number of publications, connections, and years in research, the distance metrics from the most productive to the rest are computed and compared. The study hypothesizes that if the distance is too large; it reflects the socially unsustainable situation in the network. The results indicate that certain level of social unsustainability exists in social sciences groups in Vietnam. Though the results are only indicative, it has opened up a fertile space for future inquiry into this matter.

CHARACTERIZATION OF VALUABLE INFORMATION FROM SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS DURING NATURAL DISASTERS

Twitter, a microblog site, have emerged as a new source for detecting and monitoring disaster events specifically earthquakes. The data streamed in Twitter can be used to pull actionable data for emergency response and relief operation. However, no effort has been made to classify data in conversational and informative form which has been used as a common reference for the decision-makers to streamline priorities and activities during a disaster. This paper makes an initial effort in classifying tweets by examining more than 10,000 tweets generated using the hashtags, #Lindol, #EarthquakePH, #Mindanao and the word ‘Lindol’ as a mention. The results are generated using Rapidminer software and deemed as necessary and useful for the disaster management unit. Information generated from the classification can also be used by the social science research communities to study various aspects of preparedness, response, impact and recovery of disaster. Article DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.20319/mijst.2017.32.493505 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Talanoa: Building a Pasifika Research Culture ed. by Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop

Reviewed by: Talanoa: Building a Pasifika Research Culture ed. by Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop Nāsili Vaka‘Uta Talanoa: Building a Pasifika Research Culture, edited by Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop and Eve Coxon. Auckland: Dunmore Publishing, 2014. isbn 978-1-927212-14-1; 224 pages. Paper, nz$39.99. Talanoa: Building a Pasifika Research Culture showcases twelve chapters from both established and emerging researchers of Pacific Islander descent. Its title, according to editors Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop and Eve Coxon, refers to an online network that links New Zealand and Pacific Island universities and serves as a channel for sharing research ideas and findings among Pasifika students and researchers (also known as the Pacific Post Graduate Talanoa series). Chapters in this volume come from works shared during the first five years of the Talanoa series (2007–2012). The first chapter, written by Fairbairn-Dunlop, provides a brief [End Page 214] overview of the Talanoa series during this first five-year period: its origin, organization, and delivery, and its expansion to include staff on university campuses in the Pacific Islands. Fairbairn-Dunlop locates the strength of the program in its ability to facilitate the growth of the Pacific social science research community. Karlo Mila, in chapter 2, tackles the stereotypes and dominant narratives about Pasifika peoples as she focuses her research on high-achieving Pasifika. She aligns her work with a “positive deviance” mode of inquiry, combined with a strengths-based approach and a participative mixed-methods process. In so doing, she brings to the fore alternative positions and narratives that have been otherwise ignored. In chapter 3, Jared Mackley-Crump examines the festivalization of Pacific cultures in New Zealand, and he locates his study in the emerging area of festival studies. In this ethnographic and participant-driven research, he notes that little attention has been paid to Pacific festival space in New Zealand. He engages the themes of festival and community and roots his work in indigenous frames based on ‘Epeli Hau‘ofa’s “sea of islands” and Tēvita Ka‘ili’s “tauhi vā.” Chapter 4, by Charlotte Bedford, assesses the Recognised Seasonal Employer policy and asks the question: Is it delivering “wins” to employers, workers, and Island communities? She uses both quantitative and qualitative data to measure the success of the project. Chapter 5 shifts the focus to the availability of information on Pasifika fathers and their influence on their children. El-Shadan Tautolo acknowledges that due to a lack of information, services are not targeted at Pasifika fathers in New Zealand. He argues that there is a need for more information because it would lead to fathers being better informed and supported to fulfill their roles. Tui Nicola Clery, in chapter 6, offers the only essay that explicitly mentions talanoa. Her work sets out to develop methods for peace research in Fiji, and that involves weaving together indigenous and nonindigenous ideas. Her aim is to create peace research that is ethical, culturally reflective, respectful, and profoundly communicative. She articulates for that purpose key Pasifika concepts like teu le vā (to maintain or cherish relations); talanoa (talk, conversation; to tell stories); and tiko (participatory learning). She then combines ideas from these concepts with arts-based approaches to establish complementary research tools for use in multicultural communities. In chapter 7, Patrick Vakaoti, another Fijian contributor, has as his research focus the young men who frequent the streets of Suva. To Vakaoti, street space is one of the “developmental crossroads” that creates both opportunities and tensions. The “street-frequenting young men” are those for whom the streets have become “home”—a site of survival, identity formation, and resistance. Vakaoti argues that these young men are normal citizens who deserve something better in the society in which they live. In chapter 8, Litea Meo-Sewabu, also from Fiji, explores cultural conceptualizations of health and well-being; [End Page 215] she maintains that the praxis of ethnography offers some valuable lessons. She discusses the development of a research framework centered on the concept of “cultural discernment” in relation to Fijian knowledge. Through the process of cultural discernment, “a group of people collaborate to ensure that the research process is ethical within the cultural context of...

Choroideremia research: Report and perspectives on the second international scientific symposium for choroideremia

ABSTRACTPurpose: To discuss progress in research on choroideremia (CHM) and related retinopathies with special emphasis on gene therapy approaches.Methods: Biomedical and clinical researchers from across the world as well as representatives of the social science research community were convened to the 2nd International Scientific Symposium for Choroideremia in Denver, Colorado in June 2014 to enhance our understanding of CHM and accelerate the translation of research to clinical application for the benefit of those affected by CHM.Results: Pre-clinical research using cell and animal models continues to further our understanding in the pathogenesis of CHM as well as to demonstrate proof-of-concept for gene transfer strategies. With the advent of modern imaging technology, better outcome measures are being defined for upcoming clinical trials. Results from the first gene therapy trial in CHM show promise, with sustained visual improvement over 6 months post-treatment. Current and next-generation gene transfer approaches may make targeted vector delivery possible in the future for CHM and other inherited retinal diseases.Conclusions: While no accepted therapies exist for CHM, promising approaches using viral-vectored gene therapy and cell therapies are entering clinical trials for eye diseases, with gene therapy trials underway for CHM.

English

Executive Summary: Leisure in parks and other forms of protected areas are connected to an individual’s health and well-being. In this paper, we report on the results of a multi-year study that surveyed 1,515 visitors to three Provincial Parks and three Kananaskis Country Provincial Recreation Areas in Alberta, Canada. Results revealed several important findings with significant policy and planning implications for Alberta Parks, as well as the international parks and protected area community more broadly. Findings show that anticipated human health and well-being benefits were a major factor motivating individuals’ decision to visit a park or protected area. Perceived psychological/emotional benefits (89.1% of visitors), social benefits (88.3%), physical benefits (80.3%) and environmental well-being benefits (79.4%) were deemed the most important motivations. However, there was a negative correlation between age and each of these perceived benefits, indicating that older visitors were less motivated to visit protected areas for these reasons. Perceived benefits (outcomes) followed a similar pattern to motivations. The most improved factors were psychological/emotional (90.5%), social (85%), and physical well-being (77.6%). A demographic analysis revealed that females rated financial, social, psychological/emotional and spiritual well-being motivations higher than males. Income and education were also positively related to individuals’ ratings of physical, psychological and environmental well-being. Interestingly, health motivations and benefits (or outcomes) were correlated highly with nature relatedness, meaning the more connected one is to nature, the greater the motivation to visit parks and the greater the health and well-being benefits received from park experiences. Overall, this study represents the largest examination of the human health and well-being benefits associated with visitor experiences in a Canadian protected areas context. The results substantiate the need for park organizations to better understand the “service provider” – “client” relationship from a human health and well-being perspective so that integrated policies and visitor experience programs can be developed or enhanced where appropriate. The Alberta Parks Division, and the international protected areas community more broadly, should actively develop the social science foundation internally, and externally (through partnerships with the social science research community), to ensure that decisions are science-based, society-oriented, and effective at meeting both conservation and visitor experience objectives. Finally, our research indicates the need for a better empirical understanding of the human health and well-being motivations and benefits of visitors representing different social and population subgroups (e.g., youth, elderly, couples, family units, new immigrants) and of the role of distinct natural environments in health promotion.

Geographic Situational Awareness: Mining Tweets for Disaster Preparedness, Emergency Response, Impact, and Recovery

Social media data have emerged as a new source for detecting and monitoring disaster events. A number of recent studies have suggested that social media data streams can be used to mine actionable data for emergency response and relief operation. However, no effort has been made to classify social media data into stages of disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, emergency response, and recovery), which has been used as a common reference for disaster researchers and emergency managers for decades to organize information and streamline priorities and activities during the course of a disaster. This paper makes an initial effort in coding social media messages into different themes within different disaster phases during a time-critical crisis by manually examining more than 10,000 tweets generated during a natural disaster and referencing the findings from the relevant literature and official government procedures involving different disaster stages. Moreover, a classifier based on logistic regression is trained and used for automatically mining and classifying the social media messages into various topic categories during various disaster phases. The classification results are necessary and useful for emergency managers to identify the transition between phases of disaster management, the timing of which is usually unknown and varies across disaster events, so that they can take action quickly and efficiently in the impacted communities. Information generated from the classification can also be used by the social science research communities to study various aspects of preparedness, response, impact and recovery.