Assessing community resilience on the US coast using school principals as key informants

The concept of community resilience is increasingly being embraced as a framework for enhancing disaster readiness and response capability. Understanding the resources that yield community resilience is a critical research challenge and has the potential to inform policies across the homeland community. Informants other than designated public officials are needed to provide a “grass-roots” perspective on community resilience. We surveyed a sample of school principals who served as “key informants” about the communities in which their schools were located. Our primary goals were first, to determine if our survey could provide a good measure of resilience adaptive capacities and, second, to evaluate the effectiveness of principals as key informants for the capacities of Social Capital, Economic Development, Community Competence, and Information and Communication related to disaster responses. Using data from 887 principals (RR 17%), survey items loaded highly on their intended factors in exploratory factor analyses. In tests of within-subjects effects, mean scores for the capacities were significantly different from each other. A significant between-subjects effect showed that principal ratings of community resilience varied according to level of school poverty so that economic resources widely diverged by level of school poverty. We concluded that our survey was effective in measuring resilience capacities with a population of geographically diverse principals although responses were low. While principals are in a role to identify capacities and provide disaster leadership, engaging them was challenging and requires buy-in from district/state education institutions.

► We surveyed school principals in U.S. coastal counties using a survey designed to elicit community characteristics that we identified as adaptive for resilience.
► School principals were effective as key informants in identifying community capacities for economic resources, social capital, community competence, and communication of community-relevant information.
► Distinct differences in opinions of community resilience existed related to the level of poverty in a school, in that economic development or resources in a community were inversely related to level of school poverty.
► We conclude that ascertaining public opinion about the characteristics of a community that make it resilient is possible with the use of key informants and this can contribute to maximizing community resources when planning for disaster recovery and hazard mitigation.