Asking People About Their Lives in Chaos: Issues in Studying Survivors of Disaster Events

• In Event: 331 - Section on Environment and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Disasters

Abstract

In this paper, we explore ethical and methodological issues that lay beneath the methodology of ‘studying’ people in the wake of disaster events. Ordinarily, researchers take great caution when they are attempting to describe and analyze the lives of named vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, prisoners and children. Disaster situations create a context where otherwise healthy people can become vulnerable, because disasters generate a wide range of stressors. We confronted a number of ethical quandaries in our ongoing research with staff members and key stakeholders at non-government organizations in New Orleans post-Katrina. The specific quandaries that emerged in our work include: 1) asking participants to share their lives during ongoing crises – taking versus giving; 2) navigating implicit and explicit power relationships between researcher and participant in a disaster; 3) understanding the complexities of how survivors of disaster separate their own experiences amidst the community-wide chaos and 4) determining reliable, valid and generalizable data in a post-disaster community. In this work, we argue that disaster survivors are vulnerable and require special considerations, and that researching disaster-affected populations requires reflexivity. After providing an analysis of our experiences with these issues, we make recommendations for future disaster research methodologies.

Authors

• Bethany L. Van Brown, Loyola University, New Orleans

• Pamela Jean Jenkins, University of New Orleans