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Life after Hurricane Katrina: The Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project
Author(s) -
Waters Mary C.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
sociological forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.937
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1573-7861
pISSN - 0884-8971
DOI - 10.1111/socf.12271
Subject(s) - hurricane katrina , psychological resilience , community resilience , natural disaster , mental health , multidisciplinary approach , inclusion (mineral) , disaster recovery , disaster research , resilience (materials science) , psychology , gerontology , sociology , criminology , geography , political science , medicine , social psychology , social science , psychiatry , physics , meteorology , thermodynamics , redundancy (engineering) , computer science , law , operating system
This article presents an overview of the findings to date of the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project, a longitudinal study of 1,019 young, predominantly female and African American community college students who were surveyed a year before Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and then two to three times afterward. This study combines a multidisciplinary, multimethod approach to understanding the immediate and long‐term effects of the Katrina disaster on physical and mental health, economic and social functioning, and neighborhood attainment. I discuss what we can learn from the rare inclusion of predisaster data and our unusual ability to follow participants for years after the disaster. I argue that it is important to follow the recovery of individuals and communities as well as the recovery of the city, as these are often not the same, especially in Katrina where a large proportion of the city never returned.