Engaging youth in post-disaster research: Lessons learned from a creative methods approach

Children and youth often demonstrate resilience and capacity in the face of disasters. Yet, they are typically not given the opportunities to engage in youth-driven research and lack access to official channels through which to contribute their perspectives to policy and practice during the recovery process. To begin to fill this void in research and action, this multi-site research project engaged youth from disaster-affected communities in Canada and the United States. This article presents a flexible youth-centric workshop methodology that uses participatory and arts-based methods to elicit and explore youth’s disaster and recovery experiences. The opportunities and challenges associated with initiating and maintaining partnerships, reciprocity and youth-adult power differentials using arts-based methods, and sustaining engagement in post-disaster settings, are discussed. Ultimately, this work contributes to further understanding of the methods being used to conduct research for, with, and about youth.Keywords: youth, disaster recovery, engagement, resilience, arts-based methods, participatory researc

The Hurricane Sandy Place Report: Evacuation Decisions, Housing Issues and Sense of Community

Hurricane Sandy was one of the largest storms on record, sweeping through the eastern seaboard of the United States with a massive diameter twice the size of Hurricane Katrina. Although wind speeds did not match those of Katrina, the combination of high tide at landfall and the lunar phase resulted in exceptionally high storm surges. Catastrophic storms such as Hurricane Sandy can have devastating effects on many aspects of human life and the environment, undermining economic activity, crippling critical infrastructure, and disrupting hundreds of thousands of lives for weeks, months, or even years. The Sandy Child and Family Health (S-CAFH) Study was designed to describe and analyze the impacts of the storm on the residents of New Jersey, identifying those needs which emerged and those which are still pressing. The research team – a partnership of faculty and research staff from Rutgers University, New York University, Columbia University, and Colorado State University – randomly selected and surveyed 1,000 residents of New Jersey’s “Disaster Footprint,” representing the experiences of 1 million New Jersey residents living in or near those coastal areas of the state most directly exposed to the storm. The primary focus of this Briefing Report, the first in a series of four thematic reports, is to document the storm’s impact on PLACE in New Jersey residents’ lives, with a particular emphasis on Sandy’s effect on people’s homes and housing decisions

The Hurricane Sandy Person Report: Disaster Exposure, Health Impacts, Economic Burden, and Social Well-Being

The impact a disaster has on the health of a population can be described as having a “dose-response” relationship: the larger the “dose” of the disaster, the greater the health impact or “response” among those individuals and communities exposed. This PERSON Briefing Report describes the impact of Hurricane Sandy (the dose) on the health and well-being of adults and children exposed to the storm (the response). Data for the report are drawn from the baseline survey of the Sandy Child and Family Health (S-CAFH) Study, an observational cohort study of nearly 1,000 randomly-selected New Jersey residents who were living in areas of the state exposed to the storm in 2012. Participants in the study represent over 1 million people living in Sandy’s “Disaster Footprint,” the hurricane-exposed portions of the state. This report describes and examines several critical aspects of individual health and well-being that may be associated with the storm, including: 1. Physical health of adults; 2. Psychological and emotional health of adults; 3. Social and economic health of adults; 4. Health and well-being of children; and 5. The association between disaster exposure and individual outcomes