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Building disaster resilience using social messaging networks: the WeChat community in Houston, Texas, during Hurricane Harvey
Author(s) -
Chu Haoran,
Yang Janet Z.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
disasters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.744
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-7717
pISSN - 0361-3666
DOI - 10.1111/disa.12388
Subject(s) - social capital , disaster research , community resilience , landfall , natural disaster , psychological resilience , resilience (materials science) , social media , storm , social support , sociology , political science , psychology , geography , engineering , social psychology , social science , physics , redundancy (engineering) , meteorology , reliability engineering , thermodynamics , law
Analyses of disaster resilience have focused increasingly on the role of social capital and online social networks in recovery. This study complements this field of work by investigating three key issues. First, it examines how a social messaging application, WeChat, helped individuals to access and to mobilise three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking—during Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that made landfall in Louisiana and Texas in the United States in August 2017, resulting in significant flooding and loss of life. Second, it pinpoints and assesses quantitatively how individuals' WeChat group usage and social capital influenced their post‐disaster well‐being. Third, it demonstrates how a minority and immigrant community in Houston, Texas, overcame the disadvantages commonly observed in other disaster research through the utilisation of social media. The findings of this study should aid governmental and community efforts to foster resilience in the face of natural and human‐induced hazards.