Search results

This article explores the community recovery and resilience element of “building back better” (BBB) through the perspectives and experiences of community influencers who provided psychosocial supports after the 2013 floods in southern Alberta, Canada.

The Alberta Resilient Communities (ARC) project adopted a community-based research methodology to examine the lived realities of children, youth, families and their communities postflood. In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with 37 community influencer participants representing a range of organizations including not-for-profit agencies, community organizations, social service agencies and government departments.

The findings were drawn from the interviews held with community influencers in flood-affected communities. Major themes include disaster response challenges, insufficient funding for long-term disaster recovery, community partnerships and collaborations and building and strengthening social capital.

Findings demonstrate the need to build better psychosocial services, supports and resources in the long term to support community recovery and resilience postdisaster for children, youth and families to “build back better” on a psychosocial level.

Local social service agencies play a key role in the capacity of children, youth and families to “build back better” postdisaster. These organizations need to be resourced and prepared to respond to psychosocial needs in the long term in order to successfully contribute to postdisaster recovery.

The findings illustrate that adopting a psychosocial framework for disaster recovery can better inform social service disaster response and long-term recovery plans consistent with the BBB framework. Implications for social service agencies and policymakers interested in fostering postdisaster community recovery and resilience, particularly with children and youth, are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to explore influencing factors that affect the effectiveness of service recovery strategies using social network from operations management perspective. Specifically, the authors study the relationships between social media agent responses to customer complaints, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors investigate the roles of recovery speed and failure severity in the service recovery process using social network platform.

The results are based on 347 mini cases drawn from the Twitter accounts of a sample of airlines. Grounded theory approach is used to conduct qualitative analysis using NVivo 9, a qualitative data analysis program. A conceptual framework was developed, then tested using χ² analysis.

Agent responses that do not require customers to take further initiatives for problem solving have positive effects on customer emotion alleviation and satisfaction. In contrast, responses that provide further directions poses negative effect on service recovery outcomes. There is a strong positive linkage between customer emotion change and customer satisfaction. Surprisingly, the direct effect of recovery speed on customer emotion and satisfaction is not supported by the data. Rather, it plays a moderating role in affecting the relationship between agent responses and customer satisfaction. The qualitative data further reveals the pivotal role of failure severity, one of key service failure attributes.

The authors study service businesses’ recovery strategies using social media. A conceptual framework is developed to link agent responses, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction from the lens of service providers, using an operations-oriented approach. Finding on recovery speed and failure severity reveal that these variables play different roles when service recovery is operated on social media platform as compared to traditional channels. Additionally, relying on tweets as data sources has constrained us from assessing other long-term service recovery outcomes such as loyalty, repurchase intent and word of mouth. The drawback is resulted from the limited information conveyed through tweets, which tends to be short and brief. The study focusses on the airline industry, which limits the generalizability of the findings to other service industries.

The authors highlight the value and potential of service recovery strategies using social network and provide insights for recovery operations where agent responses should be focussing on real time problem solving. The findings support the benefits of empowering social network agents for service recovery operations. Improving recovery speed should be less of a priority as it serves as a qualifier when service recovery is operated via social network. Given the pivotal role of failure severity, it is critical for social network agents to stand in the shoes of the complaining customers, making imminent assessment of the actual failure severity and taking action accordingly in real time. In the meantime, effective communication through social network may help to lower perceived magnitude of failure by customers, which in turn enhance the effectiveness of other service recovery efforts.

This study is the first attempt to investigate the service recovery process using social media from an operations-oriented perspective. The results supports the potentials of employing service recovery strategies using social media.

The concept of personal recovery is now a key pillar of service delivery. It aims to support individuals to flourish and establish a new identity following an acute episode or diagnosis. This view of recovery is unique to each person on that journey. However, there has been a significant focus on measuring these experiences. This paper aims to explore the influence of social constructionism on the concept of recovery within an Irish context, seeking to understand the influence of language, discourse and power on service users’ experiences.

A qualitative, interpretivist methodology was adopted for this case study design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 service users. Thematic analysis was chosen as the method of analysis.

Personalising recovery did not always lead to the removal of biological symptoms, but with the appropriate supports, individual’s recovery journey was greatly enhanced. On the contrary, personal recovery places overwhelmingly responsibility on the individual to succeed, largely driven by neoliberal discourse. This focus on individualism and the pressure to succeed was further experienced when people sought to re-integrate into society and participate in normalised social order. Ultimately, for many service users, they viewed personal recovery as an unfulfilled promise.

It is not a representative sample of service users within an Irish context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore influence of social constructionism on the concept of personal recovery within a mental health service context.

This study aims to explore and describe staff working in a Norwegian supportive housing site’s experiences with promoting social community participation for residents with co-occurring problems. The research question addressed was: how does residential support staff experience promoting social community participation for residents with co-occurring problems?

Nine residential support staff participated in qualitative interviews. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were analysed using Braun and Clarke's approach to thematic analysis.

The analysis process resulted in two themes: “It is all about economics” and “Who will pay for it?”

Regarding the Nordic welfare system, the need for a redistribution of financial resources in health services is discussed. The authors recommend that further studies explore people outside the regular health-care system perspectives on how they can contribute to making community inclusion a reality for persons experiencing co-occurring problems.

This study provides a nuanced understanding of how financial resources can impede or support efforts and opportunities to promote community inclusion for residents experiencing co-occurring problems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the internal and social factors that persons with experience from severe mental illness and alcohol and other drugs problems, and who have received treatment for these problems, describe as important for initiating and maintaining a recovery process.

In total, 40 persons were interviewed and asked to describe factors they perceived as important for initiating and maintaining recovery. The software Nvivo was used to categorise data in internal and social factors with subcategories.

There is significant variation in how recovery emerged but involved in general having a proper social situation and finding meaning in life. Initially, the majority had a marginalised situation with need of assistance with housing, employment, financial and social support.

The change process in the investigated group is interpreted as related to individual resources rather than belonging to a group defined as having “double trouble”.

The study implies that in addition to professional help to handle diagnosed problems, the group in focus also need support and interventions that address individual complex needs.

Supporting activities/peer support seem to be important for those lacking support from family. At the same time, it is important to recognise the risk of being forced into a recovery identity which might lead to worsening the situation for those who do not fit into this.

By using the same design as in previous studies, comparisons with other groups are possible while still keeping the qualitative meaning of the investigated factors.

This paper introduces a model of social repair to the language of disaster recovery that potentially provides a new way of conceptualizing reconstruction and recovery processes by drawing attention to the dismantling of structural inequities that inhibit post-disaster recovery.

The paper first engages with the current discourse of vulnerability reduction and resilience building as embedded within a distinct politics of post-disaster recovery. The concept of social repair is then explored as found within post-conflict and reconciliation literature. For application within the context of natural disasters, the concept of social repair is modified to have evaluative and effectiveness significance for disaster recovery. A short case example is presented from post-flood Pakistan to deepen our understanding of the potential application and usage of a social repair orientation to disaster recovery.

The paper recommends that the evaluative goals of post-disaster recovery projects should be framed in the language of social repair. This means that social relationships (broadly defined) must be restored and transformed as a result of any disaster recovery intervention, and relationship mapping exercises should be conducted with affected communities prior to planning recovery interventions.

Current discourses of disaster recovery are rooted within the conceptual framings of reducing vulnerabilities and building resilience. While both theoretical constructs have made important contributions to the disaster recovery enterprise, they have been unable to draw sufficient attention to pre-existing structural inequities. As disaster recovery and reconstruction projects influence the ways communities negotiate and manage future risk, it is important that interventions do not lead to worsened states of inequity.

This chapter provides the foundation for the book. The objective of this chapter is to outline the theme of the book and to provide the context for the chapters that follow. Disaster recovery is a challenge for governments and for affected communities, families, and individuals. It is a challenge, because recovery from catastrophic disasters can be much more complicated and elusive than what can be addressed by national and international aid organizations given the time and other resources. The short literature review provides the research context, and the overview of the book describes each of the chapters briefly.

The purpose of this research is to examine why communities facing the same disaster recover differentially and determine pathways to successful disaster recovery in the research setting of New Orleans neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Katrina. While previous studies suggest that there are a variety of pathways to recovery, a broader cross-case comparison is necessary to generalize these pathways into a recovery framework. Specifically, this study seeks to determine what pre-disaster and post-disaster causal factors, alone or in combination, were important to recovery following Hurricane Katrina.

This paper presents a cross-case comparative study of neighborhood-level recovery. Based on prior work, which used the Delphi method to determine hypothesized causal factors and indicators of recovery, data was collected through publically available sources, including the US Census, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and previously completed studies for 18 damaged neighborhoods. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was used due to its ability to analyze both quantitative and qualitative data for smaller case studies.

The results show that there are multiple pathways combining pre-disaster community factors and post-disaster actions that led to recovery, as measured by population return. For example, economic capacity is nearly sufficient for recovery, but a combination of low social vulnerability, post-disaster community participation, a high proportion of pre-World War II housing stock and high amounts of post-disaster funds also led to recovery.

This research uses a novel method to link pre-disaster measures of resilience and vulnerability to recovery outcomes and, through cross-case comparison, generates results that will enable researchers to develop a theory of sustainable community recovery.

Being excluded blights the lives of the mentally ill. Exclusion is both cause and consequence of mental ill‐health and extends beyond material deprivation to exclusion from the activities which give meaning to life. Promoting inclusion is central to the work of all mental health practitioners and the purpose of this paper is to advance the practices which support this.

The literature on what supports social inclusion and the related concept of recovery is reviewed. The working practices and prevailing theoretical models in psychiatry are also considered in the context of understanding how these practices and models can support socially inclusive and recovery‐orientated ways of working.

Social inclusion and recovery interact dynamically. Central to being “in recovery” is the experience of being included. Social inclusion is also a platform on which to participate in life's activities and to learn to “live well” again. The practices which support these approaches are consistent with medical models of care, with the bio‐psychosocial model that prevails in psychiatric practice and with existing guidelines on the nature and purpose of the therapeutic relationship.

Obstacles are described that impede adopting new practices and these include creating additional work, increased risk in a risk averse environment, and incompatibility with current models of medical practice. This paper seeks to describe the cost of exclusion, the value of inclusion, the practices which support recovery and social inclusion and to refute the arguments for not adopting these ways of working.

How can governments and survivors prepare for and manage natural disasters? Post-disaster reconstruction researchers advocate that community involvement is needed to help survivors recover effectively. This study aims to propose that cooperative goals between government officials and survivors develop guanxi relationships and constructive controversy wherein survivors voice their opinions to aid disaster recovery.

The authors adopted the critical incident technique (CIT), which has proved especially useful for studying complex issues, as well as site-intensive research for interviews and participant observation. After developing a local reputation and rapport by working in a residential resettlement area for two months, an author used the CIT to ask 118 survivors of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to describe specific incidents when they interacted with government officials about recovery issues and then to rate survey items that measure independent and dependent variables.

Results, including structural equation analyses, support the reasoning that cooperative goals between government and survivors facilitate guanxi and constructive controversy, which in turn produced effective disaster recovery, as indicated by survivors’ social support, satisfaction, reduced stress and beliefs that government officials led effectively.

The data are self-reported and subject to biases and may not be accurate.

In addition to developing theoretical understanding, the results can have important practical implications for strengthening relationships and constructive controversy between government and survivors.

Results suggest that communities have practical ways to prepare for disasters. Structuring cooperative goals among survivors, encouraging guanxi relationships, and training in constructive controversy should promote effective recovery from natural disasters.

The paper develops theory and research on how leaders can promote community involvement for effective disaster management. The paper proposes that high-quality interpersonal relationships, also referred to guanxi, and the open-minded discussion of opposing ideas, labeled constructive controversy, are major components of effective community involvement. The paper adds to the literature by empirically documenting the utility of the Western-developed theory of cooperation and competition and the concept of constructive controversy for understanding the effectiveness of government leadership for disaster recovery in China.