The Use of Narrative Inquiry in Disaster Research: Listening to Those Who Matter the Most
Location
DeSantis Room 1049
Format Type
Plenary
Format Type
Paper
Start Date
17-1-2020 9:45 AM
End Date
17-1-2020 10:05 AM
Abstract
Disaster research studies the phenomena associated with times of crisis during a period of disaster (Quarantelli, 1997). A disaster is defined as a sudden dreadful event that severely interrupts the functioning of a community or society and causes both material and immaterial losses that might exceed the people’s ability to cope using their own resources (IFRC, 2019). Disaster research examines how natural hazards, humanitarian emergencies and conflicts, technological miscarriage incidents and other fatal hazards affect endanger the lives, environment and wellbeing of an individual, community and nation-states. Disaster research evaluates the plan and the implementation of disaster preparedness, response and recovery actions. Rousseau is contended to be the first person to give a scientific view of natural disasters (Dynes, 2000). He observed and concluded that the fatalities of the 1755 earthquake could have been lessened if the city’s density had been lowered and people had been evacuated straightway after the first tremor had been felt. Although researchers have been studying disasters for more than a century, the scientific analyses have only just been completed, with a very limited amount of writing that discusses disaster research methods (Stalling, 2002).
Disaster research has involved numerous researchers from diverse backgrounds and also various research traditions. Still, the most common used method of inquiry since 1920s is qualitative study; with interview-based and case study research flooding the field of research (Phillips, 2002). The United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015-2020 highlighted the importance of multi hazard and solution-driven disaster research and called for more studies on disaster risk management. Aside from this, the Advancing Skill Creation to Enhance Transformation (ASCENT) project was released with aims to contribute towards this SFDRR goal by reinforcing the research and innovative competences of researchers. Under the sponsorship of the ASCENT project, Lill & Witt (2017) conducted a survey on methodologies of contemporary resilience research. In order to know what research methodologies are commonly used, they analyzed 146 disaster resilience based research in environment research articles from leading disaster journals from 2005 to 2015 and discovered the general research methods used in the research are qualitative (85 articles), quantitative (35 articles), mixed methods (9 articles); most common sources of data collection are literature (67), interviews (43) and questionnaires (32); methodological keywords that help to describe research methods are case studies (60), theoretical or conceptual framework (27) and discussion (22).
Tiernan et.al. (2019) analyzed 150 academic papers published from 2012 to 2017 and identified three emerging themes in disaster research which include: socialization of resilience; risk management with an emphasis on public private partnerships as enabling mechanisms; and a nuanced exploration of the concept of adaptive resilience. While Wang et. al. (2019) investigated 55,786 articles with disaster as the topic from the Web of Science Core Collection from 1999 to 2017 and reported that geological environment changes and geologic hazards triggered by earthquakes are the most popular research topic and designing disaster prevention and mitigation strategies is a new popular field of disaster research. Using a smaller scope, disaster research in Indonesia only, Djalante (2018) looked at 744 publications from 1978 until 2017,concluded that the major research stream is on hazards, risks and disaster assessment, and less concerning disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, and the most-frequently reviewed hazards are volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. Another point Djalante mentioned was that most of the research was published in geography, earth sciences or inter-disciplinary journals on disaster, and less on social science, public administration, emergency management, and political science journals.
The technical science of disaster is still the prevalent theme in areas of disaster research, but there is an urgent need to investigate disaster from the perspective of social science and making disaster research becoming more in touch with the human side of disaster. In researching resilience, disaster risk reduction, or disaster education, human experiences are important. Using those experiences, we can gain a better idea of how the events happen, what the people need, or what should be trained and taught to people, so that they are better prepared for the occasions when disasters happen. These experiences need to be organized into meaningful units, it could be a story or a narrative. A narrative acknowledges the social, cultural, physical and emotional impact of disasters from the perspectives of those affected, and potentially convey useful ideas about ways to help build resilience for the affected community and other communities. Zellermayer, (1997) states that people could create narrative descriptions about their experiences for themselves and others, and they also could develop narratives to make sense of the behavior of others.
In this presentation, we will share our experiences of using narrative inquiry in our previous disaster research. Narrative inquiry is a term that gathers a both personal and human dimension of experience over time and analyses the relationship between individual experience and cultural context (Clandinin and Connely, 2000). Here, we will review what lesson we learned from using the narrative inquiry method; how data was collected, analyzed, and presented; and how the findings contribute to the area of disaster research. We will also discuss why the voices of the affected population matters. We will present some stories that we have collected and how the stories inform the disaster risk reduction scholars, policy makers, humanitarian agencies and other related parties.
Keywords
Narrative Inquiry, Qualitative Study, Disaster, Disaster Risk Reduction
The Use of Narrative Inquiry in Disaster Research: Listening to Those Who Matter the Most
DeSantis Room 1049
Disaster research studies the phenomena associated with times of crisis during a period of disaster (Quarantelli, 1997). A disaster is defined as a sudden dreadful event that severely interrupts the functioning of a community or society and causes both material and immaterial losses that might exceed the people’s ability to cope using their own resources (IFRC, 2019). Disaster research examines how natural hazards, humanitarian emergencies and conflicts, technological miscarriage incidents and other fatal hazards affect endanger the lives, environment and wellbeing of an individual, community and nation-states. Disaster research evaluates the plan and the implementation of disaster preparedness, response and recovery actions. Rousseau is contended to be the first person to give a scientific view of natural disasters (Dynes, 2000). He observed and concluded that the fatalities of the 1755 earthquake could have been lessened if the city’s density had been lowered and people had been evacuated straightway after the first tremor had been felt. Although researchers have been studying disasters for more than a century, the scientific analyses have only just been completed, with a very limited amount of writing that discusses disaster research methods (Stalling, 2002).
Disaster research has involved numerous researchers from diverse backgrounds and also various research traditions. Still, the most common used method of inquiry since 1920s is qualitative study; with interview-based and case study research flooding the field of research (Phillips, 2002). The United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015-2020 highlighted the importance of multi hazard and solution-driven disaster research and called for more studies on disaster risk management. Aside from this, the Advancing Skill Creation to Enhance Transformation (ASCENT) project was released with aims to contribute towards this SFDRR goal by reinforcing the research and innovative competences of researchers. Under the sponsorship of the ASCENT project, Lill & Witt (2017) conducted a survey on methodologies of contemporary resilience research. In order to know what research methodologies are commonly used, they analyzed 146 disaster resilience based research in environment research articles from leading disaster journals from 2005 to 2015 and discovered the general research methods used in the research are qualitative (85 articles), quantitative (35 articles), mixed methods (9 articles); most common sources of data collection are literature (67), interviews (43) and questionnaires (32); methodological keywords that help to describe research methods are case studies (60), theoretical or conceptual framework (27) and discussion (22).
Tiernan et.al. (2019) analyzed 150 academic papers published from 2012 to 2017 and identified three emerging themes in disaster research which include: socialization of resilience; risk management with an emphasis on public private partnerships as enabling mechanisms; and a nuanced exploration of the concept of adaptive resilience. While Wang et. al. (2019) investigated 55,786 articles with disaster as the topic from the Web of Science Core Collection from 1999 to 2017 and reported that geological environment changes and geologic hazards triggered by earthquakes are the most popular research topic and designing disaster prevention and mitigation strategies is a new popular field of disaster research. Using a smaller scope, disaster research in Indonesia only, Djalante (2018) looked at 744 publications from 1978 until 2017,concluded that the major research stream is on hazards, risks and disaster assessment, and less concerning disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, and the most-frequently reviewed hazards are volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. Another point Djalante mentioned was that most of the research was published in geography, earth sciences or inter-disciplinary journals on disaster, and less on social science, public administration, emergency management, and political science journals.
The technical science of disaster is still the prevalent theme in areas of disaster research, but there is an urgent need to investigate disaster from the perspective of social science and making disaster research becoming more in touch with the human side of disaster. In researching resilience, disaster risk reduction, or disaster education, human experiences are important. Using those experiences, we can gain a better idea of how the events happen, what the people need, or what should be trained and taught to people, so that they are better prepared for the occasions when disasters happen. These experiences need to be organized into meaningful units, it could be a story or a narrative. A narrative acknowledges the social, cultural, physical and emotional impact of disasters from the perspectives of those affected, and potentially convey useful ideas about ways to help build resilience for the affected community and other communities. Zellermayer, (1997) states that people could create narrative descriptions about their experiences for themselves and others, and they also could develop narratives to make sense of the behavior of others.
In this presentation, we will share our experiences of using narrative inquiry in our previous disaster research. Narrative inquiry is a term that gathers a both personal and human dimension of experience over time and analyses the relationship between individual experience and cultural context (Clandinin and Connely, 2000). Here, we will review what lesson we learned from using the narrative inquiry method; how data was collected, analyzed, and presented; and how the findings contribute to the area of disaster research. We will also discuss why the voices of the affected population matters. We will present some stories that we have collected and how the stories inform the disaster risk reduction scholars, policy makers, humanitarian agencies and other related parties.