Selecting longitudinal community outcomes for resilience indicator validation

Published

May 13, 2025

Author(s)

Donghwan Gu, Maria Dillard, Michael Gerst, Jarrod Loerzel

Abstract

Assessing community resilience is a long-sought goal in multiple fields of study and practice. Community resilience frameworks have been designed to estimate the level of resilience through varying sets of cross-sectional indicators. However, community resilience is a complex system consisting of emergent properties. Current framework designs are unsuitable for tracking longitudinal outcomes of resilience related to disturbances, such as whether a community has mitigated the initial impact and recovered from the decline. Accordingly, while many community resilience frameworks have been suggested as a solution to quantify the resilience levels of communities, research has not yet examined outcomes of community resilience to establish a dependent variable or a benchmark that can be used to validate individual baseline community resilience indicators and composite indicators in the existing frameworks. This study examines community resilience outcomes to reflect key elements of resilience definitions, such as robustness and recovery. This study analyzed 995 counties in the US with a single presidential disaster declaration event within seven years of the observation period (two pre-event years and five post-event years) from 2002 to 2020. The outcome indicators were designed to present archetypes of community changes based on pre- and post-event values. For example, a county can be categorized as a resisted, recovered, or not recovered county in terms of the county's ability to mitigate the initial impact and bounce back. This study presented 14 outcome indicators representing four domains of community resilience (population, economy, social vulnerability, and health). Then, four outcome indicators (population, employment, eviction rate, and life expectancy) were selected based on criteria regarding the distribution and expected connection to damage and pre-event community characteristics. Generalized SEM and hierarchical cluster analysis methods were used to quantify a hypothetical construct of resilience outcomes. The estimated outcomes provide an intuitive and practical summary of observed longitudinal community responses to disruption and support researchers and practitioners to test the quality of resilience indicators through a validation method rooted in empirical evidence.

Citation

Natural Hazards Review

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1061/NHREFO.NHENG-2224

Local Download

Keywords

community resilience, indicators, validation

Citation

Gu, D. , Dillard, M. , Gerst, M. and Loerzel, J. (2025), Selecting longitudinal community outcomes for resilience indicator validation, Natural Hazards Review, [online], https://doi.org/10.1061/NHREFO.NHENG-2224, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956733 (Accessed May 14, 2025)