Evacuating Natural Disasters: The Role of Social Networks
https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-09-17/how-social-networks-can-save-lives-when-disasters-strike
In light of Hurricane Florence, Daniel P. Aldrich, a Hurricane Katrina survivor, recently composed an article describing his research on how societies handle and recover from natural disasters. In order to better understand people’s evacuation patterns, Aldrich considers how one’s social ties influence evacuation behavior. While research on this topic has typically consisted of social scientists asking survivors months or years later to recount their behavior during a crisis, Aldrich’s work is centered on “…the importance of social capital during crises.” Understanding how individuals act during a crisis is indicative of the resources and information available to them–factors which can be crucial when making the life-or-death decision to stay or leave.
Through teaming up with companies like Facebook, individuals’ posts on social media were analyzed before, during, and after hurricanes. By understanding one’s social network, it is easier to analyze why some individuals evacuate and others don’t. Aldrich studied three different types of social ties: bonding ties, bridging ties, and linking ties. Bonding ties are the ties which link close family and friends. Bridging ties connect individuals to more far-reaching networks, or as we learned in class, individuals who do not share a friend in common (no triadic closure). Linking ties connect individuals to people in positions of power.
The research shows that individuals with increased connections outside of their densely connected social networks are more likely to evacuate during disasters. These outside connections, or bridging ties, provide individuals with information which encourages their evacuation – possibly friends from a city they used to live in hearing news of the impending disaster in their friend’s area and encouraging evacuation. These distant sources of support and information also provides these individuals with a possible location to evacuate to; people with networks that lack bridging connections lack incentive to leave their hometowns because the majority of their strong, bonding ties are centrally located in their current neighborhood. One other interesting point to note is that individuals with linking ties – for example following a politician on social media – are more likely to evacuate. Trust in and information from authority figures helps informs people’s decisions, again emphasizing the importance of a network with many different connections that reach outside of one’s closest family and friends when choosing to evacuate. Our discussion of clustering coefficients in class can be used to help explain this phenomenon—the higher the clustering coefficient, the more densely connected the network. From this, we can infer that the higher the clustering coefficient, the more likely individuals may be inclined not to evacuate because they feel a sense of safety and support within their current location—possibly providing people with a false sense of security.
I believe this research could be extremely useful in identifying high-risk neighborhoods or individuals prior to natural disasters in the future; if we could provide individuals within especially dense networks that lack external influence further information about safety or possible routes and locations for evacuation, maybe many more lives could be saved in the face of disaster. Authorities could thus more effectively allocate their time spent knocking on people’s doors, encouraging individuals who lack external resources, connections, or information with options for evacuation. Overall, social networks can be an interesting tool for studying individual’s behaviors during natural disasters.