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As disaster resilience activities are increasingly occurring at the neighbourhood level, there is a growing recognition in research and in practice of the contributions that community stakeholders can make in assessing the resilience of their communities. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process in deriving a disaster resilience measurement framework by soliciting the perspectives of stakeholders from urban neighbourhoods in two countries. The authors examined their community values, and their perspectives on both the concept of resilience and the essential elements that they believe would contribute to the resiliency of their neighbourhoods.

The authors used an appreciative inquiry approach to draw out the perspectives of 58 stakeholders from nine focus groups in five urban neighbourhoods in New Zealand and in the USA.

Results of this research show common values and recurring perceived characteristics of disaster resilience across the study sites. A neighbourhood-based disaster resilience measurement framework is developed that encompasses individual/psychological, socio-cultural, economic, infrastructural/built, and institutional/governance dimensions of disaster resilience. In the process of developing the framework, the authors identified challenges in engaging certain segments of the population and in accounting for wider structural influences on neighbourhood resilience.

Issues relating to inclusive community engagement and linkages to cross-scalar resilience factors need to be addressed in future studies.

Results of this research provide insights and guidance for policy makers and practitioners when engaging communities in the development of resilience metrics.

This study fills the literature gap in evaluating community values and stakeholders’ perspectives on disaster resilience when identifying metrics for resilience interventions in urban neighbourhoods. The proposed measurement framework is derived from cross-cultural and diverse socioeconomic settings.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the role of community participation in reducing anxiety and trauma in communities during two New Zealand earthquakes: the 1987 Edgecumbe and 2003 Te Anau events and explore the effectiveness of various approaches in providing information, reducing stress, and facilitating a recovery process.

The principle methods of data collection were semi‐structured interviews were undertaken between October 2006 and March 2007 with key agencies and individuals involved in the response and comprehensive analysis of papers, reports and articles in newspapers. The research was undertaken prior to the 4 September 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Canterbury, New Zealand, and therefore community recovery from these events are not discussed in this paper.

Effective survival and recovery from disasters depends not just on people's abilities to cope with the physical impacts of the event, but also on how the societal environment complements and supports the complex and protracted processes of community recovery. Central to recovery is how society organises, mobilises and coordinates the diverse range of organizational and professional resources that can be called upon to assist recovery.

The paper offers insight into the effectiveness and benefit of incorporating of community participation in reducing anxiety and trauma in communities during earthquakes.

There has been a considerable effort over the last decade to increase awareness of the tsunami risk in coastal Washington, USA. However, contemporary research on warning systems spawned by the recent Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy highlights the need for development of an effective tsunami warning system for both residents and transient populations, including visitors and tourists. This study sets out evaluate staff training for emergencies, emergency management exercises (including drills and evacuation), and hazard signage within motels and hotels in Ocean Shores, Washington, USA.

Data were collected from interviews with reception staff and managers at 18 hotels, motels, and other accommodation establishments.

Levels of staff training and preparedness for tsunami and other hazards were found to be generally very low, although examples of “best practice” were found at a select few establishments. Larger hotels already had orientation or general training programmes set up which had the potential to incorporate future tsunami and hazard training, while smaller “owner‐operator” businesses did not.

Suggestions on how to improve preparedness are discussed, including undertaking training needs analyses and conducting workshops, simulations and employee training to empower both businesses and employees.

This case study provides an insight into the challenges faced by emergency managers and the tourism sector in improving the effectiveness of warning systems in areas with high transient populations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a case study in Washington State, USA where traditional stories (“oral tradition”) are being used in a contemporary context. Traditional knowledge is a system of experiential knowledge acquired through the continual observation of and interaction with the environment. This form of knowledge is still held by many societies and can provide an important contribution in emergency management for natural hazards. Those holding traditional knowledge can assist in understanding the nature of local hazards, suggest appropriate risk reduction and response mechanisms, and even give options for recovery based on past experiences.

The paper first discusses the nature of traditional knowledge and how it can contribute to emergency management. It then goes on to investigate a particular case study where a traditional Native American story has been combined with contemporary methods of hazard mitigation to create an educational video for tsunami hazard.

Traditional knowledge can be used effectively to undertake hazard education and enhance response to warnings. The video, titled “Run to Higher Ground!”, is an example of this, and has been readily taken up by indigenous communities and the general population (both in the USA and internationally) as an educational tool.

The paper will be of value to those working within the emergency management sector, and is particularly useful for communities who need to respond to warnings.

In South Africa, the majority of the population struggles to access care and support for mental health challenges. Drawing on challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees in the urban margins of Johannesburg, this paper aims to explore the relationship between migration and mental health through a lens of heightened vulnerability, precarious urban spaces and unmet basic needs.

Remote interviews were conducted with respondents working in the mental health-care sector (public and private) and with migrant communities in Johannesburg. Respondents were identified via purposive sampling and interviews were conducted in English. Key findings were identified using thematic analysis.

Effective responses to asylum seekers and refugees facing mental health challenges are based on an understanding of context, of crisis and of the need to meet basic needs such as paying rent, finding employment and providing for families. These “daily stressors” not only compound “extreme traumatisation” but are a form of trauma in and of itself.

This paper shows how alternative responses determined by an understanding of context, of crisis and of the need to meet basic needs provide critical and potentially far-reaching interventions. Locating trauma in the unmet needs, precarious urban spaces and marginalisation opens up space to further question the ways that migration and mental health shape and reshape one another.

Moral exemplarity is a desirable but complex achievement. The chapter discusses the meaning of moral exemplarity and examines how the self, as a psychological and spiritual centre within a Jungian perspective, contributes to fostering moral commitment.

A narrative study was conducted amongst ten spiritual healers in New Zealand and France. Stories were collected and analysed interpretively to uncover meaningful patterns about spiritual healers’ moral stance and apprehension of the self.

Spiritual healers demonstrated a deep commitment to the self which clearly sustained a commitment to serve or help others. Commitment to the self was articulated around five core values: self-work, self-reflection, humility, self-integrity and love.

The chapter highlights the moral value of inner work. The self, in its archetypal sense, carries as potential an ‘innate morality’ that resonates in the heart and nurtures integrity and authenticity. To commit to the self requires undertaking a long and painful exploration of the psyche and integrating unconscious material into ego-consciousness. The participating spiritual healers, who had committed to their self and were well advanced on their psychological exploration journey, displayed moral qualities akin to exemplarity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implementation of a set of commitment-based HR practices and explores their impact on three categories of organizational outcomes.

Cross-sectional study based on a survey. Multiple regression analysis was applied to test the hypotheses proposed.

The results show that commitment-based HR practices make up a system that presents internal consistency and favours HR performance and operational outcomes, as well as contributing to financial outcomes through the mediator role of innovation.

The HR practices were measured based on the perception of only one informant per company, normally the manager.

This study makes it possible to draw relevant conclusions in a sector (hotel industry) that lacks references about the role of a system of commitment-based HR practices in achieving organizational outcomes. The use of a sample of homogeneous firms provides managers with valuable and specific information about the sector that can foster the adoption of commitment-based HR practices by hotel firms.

This paper contributes to better know how HR practices based on commitment foster employees’ willingness to engage in the strategic objectives established by the organization from the systems perspective. Furthermore the research contributes to the understanding of these practices in an important economic industry, such as it is the hospitality sector, in which research had traditionally placed little emphasis on this kind of analysis.