Relevance and Legitimacy: The Joy of Journals!

For the data section of this week’s post, please see Boundaries and Data, a post about the Nextdoor app as a probable data source.

This week we chose two journals to browse through and select three related articles to read and harvest ideas from. I found this to be a lengthy but helpful exercise. Many times I will search directly for articles, but by seeing the recent journal articles I got an idea of what was happening on the front lines. These articles may not be as referenced or as foundational as some of the articles that pop up on Primo, but they are fresh and new ideas that made my interests feel more legitimate and relevant. They also provided me with articles that are within the field I am interested in but not necessarily the exact study I want to do. This helped diversify my understanding of what is possible, and gave me a few ideas on how to diversify my ideas more. Below, you will find the two journals I looked at, but definitely not the last! I will definitely continue to look through journals of articles I found helpful to try to find more like that.

Annals of the American Association for Geographers

This journal focuses on Geography, an interdisciplinary field in itself that takes into account many different methods and data sources. Focuses for this journal include Environmental Sciences; Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Science; Nature and Society; and People, Place, and Region.

Sharing the Pain: Perceptions of Fairness Affect Private and Public Response to Hazards

• Motivations: The authors strive to explore how prior experience of flooding and perceptions of scope of government responsibility and capacity affect willingness to take individual adaptive action.
• Research questions: What facilitates individual adaptive behavior? How does the performance of government intervention affect such behavior?
• Data: Surveys of 356 households affected by a flood event in November 2009 in Cumbria, UK, and Galway, Ireland to compare perceptions of fairness of responses and private intentions across two political jurisdictions.
• Methods of analysis: Individual responses were recoded to a scale of 1 to 5 to represent the degree of association with public or private responsibility. Summary statistics (mean, variance, and number of valid responses) were derived for each jurisdiction.
• Key conclusion: Their findings highlight the central role of government action and its perceived fairness in
  structuring private responses to environmental risks and point to the crucial role of climate justice perspectives
  in navigating adaptation.

Geographies of Social Capital: Catastrophe Experience, Risk Perception, and the Transformation of Social Space in Postearthquake Resettlements in Sichuan, China 

• Motivations: These authors aim to explore the relationships between catastrophe experience and risk perception, social interaction, and household response to future catastrophe.
• Research questions: How are social relationships and norms adjusted to the social landscape? To what extent are they transformed by the spatial consequences of natural catastrophes?
• Data: A household survey of 371 local residents (Likert scale), an analysis of additional in-depth interviews, and a review of key changes in the neighborhoods under study.
• Methods of analysis: Analysis of Likert scale data.
• Key conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that social relationships and social norms mediate between the geographic context and a household’s behavioral response to earthquakes. Thus, this study calls for more serious engagement with the dynamic role of social capital.

Risks, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy

This relatively new journal is also an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between the perception, effects, and resulting management of crises. It examines predictable and unpredictable disasters, policy decisions related to them, and how values come into play during crisis management.

Managing Disaster Risk: An Integrative Essay About Governance, Capacity, Fragility, and Vulnerability

• Motivations: By connecting government, capacity, and fragility with vulnerability, the authors provide a more comprehensive understanding of how development interventions, specifically those related to disaster risk management, can be targeted in countries labelled as fragile.
• Research questions: How do government, capacity, fragility, and vulnerability affect how poor countries manage disaster risk?
• Data: DARA Risk Resilience Index or RRI from UNISDR (derived from an analysis of indicators of the disaster risk drivers identified in UNISDR’s Global Assessment Report)
• Methods of analysis: The authors assessed the RRI scores for Sub-Saharan countries, grouping them on the basis of state fragility.
• Key conclusion: We need to increase current development thinking that focuses on country specific, demand driven initiatives that focuses on prevention and are given an opportunity to grow, and perhaps even fail.

Not only was this an interesting and new journal to explore, but while searching for the journal’s overview, I found a really interesting question that they try to explore in their journal that resonated with me and my thesis musings:

How are effects of crises transferred through and between systems and networks, and how can organizational and policy design enhance the resilience of networks, institutions and processes in the presence of crises?

I’m interested in systems and networks within communities and how they assist disaster response, which is basically what this is asking. I might think about it more and transform it into one of my guiding questions. Seeing this as a guiding question for this whole journal definitely made my research seem more relevant and important, especially since this is a newer journal.

Overall, I will “steal” several aspects from these model articles. From Adger et. al (2016), I will take data analysis advice — I plan to have some kind of survey data that could be useful to code or send out as coded, so I can analyze results on a Likert scale. Lo et. al (2016) was like striking gold! I will definitely return to this article for background information on the use of social capital in the face of natural disasters, and I look forward to exploring their bibliography for other important works in this vein. I think it will be really interesting to add to this discussion, but instead of in a rural town environment, I will be exploring this topic in the context of third spaces, which are increasingly relevant in this day and age. Straussman et. al (2015) was least relevant to me, but I liked how they structured their paper in different sections based off the four themes they introduced in the beginning.

Adger, Neil, Tara Quinn, Irene Lorenzoni, and Conor Murphy. 2016. “Sharing the Pain: Perceptions of Fairness Affect Private and Public Response to Hazards.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, June, 1–18. doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.1182005.

Lo, Y, and O Cheung. 2016. “Geographies of Social Capital: Catastrophe Experience, Risk Perception, and the Transformation of Social Space in Postearthquake Resettlements in Sichuan, China.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, April, 1–17. doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.1159502.