Community Capacity & Resilience Building

Featured Effort: CRGC In-Person Preparedness and Resilience Survey

To meet our objectives to help communities across the Gulf Coast to more effectively understand, withstand, and overcome the multiple stressors brought on by disasters like the DWH oil spill, a recent CRGC project was the in-person survey.

The CRGC in-person survey was a cross-sectional in-person survey carried out by our research team from Tulane University in 2017, led by Dr. Amy Lesen and Dr. Reggie Ferreira. The survey was implemented in the three communities where the Consortium had placed community health workers: the Port Sulphur area in lower Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana; the Galliano area in lower Lafourche Parish, Louisiana; and the Bayou La Batre area in lower Mobile County, Alabama.

These three communities had initially been chosen for the Community Health Worker Program based on four selection criteria: (a) communities defined by geography; (b) the presence of active and effective community- or faith-based organizations operating in the community; (c) pre-existing relationships between project researchers and community organizations, activists and leaders; and (d) characteristics including resource dependent economies, presence of vulnerable populations, and significant negative impacts from Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The 60-minute in-person survey investigated the role of social networks, risk perception, preparedness measures, individual resilience, and demographics as predictors of preparedness and resilience for future hydrocarbon (oil spill) and other disaster events among households in the Gulf of Mexico.

Between June and November 2017, 21 trained data collectors administered the IRB-approved survey (Tulane Institutional Research Board Study #997431) to 326 individuals across all three sites. The data collectors were all Tulane University graduate students and faculty, except for three data collectors in Alabama who were staff of our community partner organization there and administered the survey in Vietnamese.

The survey instrument was a product of cross-disciplinary collaboration between CRGC researchers and featured questions about participants’ social networks, images participants associate with oil spills, past disaster exposure including disasters caused by both natural and technological hazards, oil spill disaster planning and risk perception based on the Protective Action Decision Model (Lindell and Perry 2004, 2012), perceived oil spill consequences, attitudes about job retraining and relocation for work, resilience attributes based on the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Connor and Davidson 2003; Campbell-Sills and Stein 2007) and participant demographics.

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