Coming to Terms with Community Disaster
Date
1997
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Publisher
Disaster Research Center
Abstract
Concepts are most useful when their formulation leads to researchable questions. For social scientists, the concept of disaster need to be rooted in some social unit--the choice here is the community, a universal form of social life and response. Since disasters are normativelydefined and are manifest by extraordinary effort on the part of community members, the mostaccurate indicators of disaster effects is found in the action and adaptation of communityorganizations. Two major community categories are identified--autonomous and dependent- while two noncommunity types--sector and noninstitutionalized--are also suggested. These different categories lead to different research leads. In any case, disaster as social disruption has to be viewed in a social system context. Disasters create many difficulties, even for social scientists. Social scientists have to dealwith concepts that also have popular meaning and some of those meanings can carry with themhigh emotional content. When events invoke moral and emotional reactions, conceptual discussions about them can often evoke charges of moral insensitivity and professional arrogance.Too, interest in disasters cuts across disciplinary lines so one's own interest is given highestpriority while the interests of others is considered marginal or perhaps even trivial. Given those difficulties, it is often prudent to ignore or at least to downplay conceptual discussions.
Periodically, however, it can be important to raise such issues. One should, however, in the discussion about disaster, disclaim responsibility to catalogue every sin, every trauma, all evil thatis intertwined with human history. There is a more delimited mandate to be explored here.
Description
Keywords
community disaster, social disruption