Research On Disaster Resilience And Its Influencing Factors In Chinese Urban Communities

Being vast in territory, China is a disaster-prone country. In China, community serves as the first scene of disasters and as well a basic line of defense against disasters. In the context where society and economy develop rapidly, the reduction of disasters will show a more complex and severe tendency, so it is hard to effectively mitigate the impacts of disasters by the government's top-down administrative power alone. In recent years, China's urbanization has been accelerated, resulting in the sharp expansion of urban capacity. In this circumstance, an urgent task is to enhance densely populated urban communities'abilities of preventing and controlling disasters. The research on community resilience under the background of disaster, focused on the construction of community-oriented disaster response ability, has important effect on the systematic engineering of disaster prevention and reduction. Foreign scholars have achieved interdisciplinary, multi-level and strongly integrated research results in the research of community disaster resilience, but mature theoretical models and frameworks are still limited. Chinese scholars have just started the research on community disaster resilience and present studies are limited to the review of foreign literatures. In view of this, realistic demand and theoretical extension are the dominant motive and logical starting point of this research.Taking the outbreak of dengue in southern China in 2014 as background, this research is aimed at exploring the manifestations of disaster resilience in different urban communities as well as the influencing factors. First, quantitative and qualitative data about the manifestations of community disaster resilience in the course of dengue outbreak are collected from the field investigation among relevant government sectors and typical communities in Guangzhou and Foshan severely afflicted by dengue. The results of data analysis show that there is great difference in the manifestation of the resilience in the course of disaster among different communities under the same or similar initial pressure. Depth analysis of single case and comparative study of multiple cases are carried out among investigated typical communities to preliminarily obtain relevant factors affecting the manifestations of community disaster resilience, thus providing realistic basis for theoretical research.Secondly, the texts acquired from depth interview among key informants in field investigation are analyzed on the basis of grounded theory. Four steps like opening coding, axial coding, selective coding and theoretical saturation test are taken to identify factors affecting disaster resilience in urban communities, including economic capital, social capital, physical environment, population characteristics and institutional factors in the community. On this basis, a model of factors affecting the disaster resilience in urban communities is constructed to further determine correlation variables through literature review, i.e. community disaster resilience is defined as an ability network covering pre-warning & response ability, post-disaster recovery ability and learning & adapting ability of the community; social network, trust and community identity are taken as variables of community social capital; employment, income, asset value and health insurance are taken as variables of community economic capital; natural environment, architectural environment and infrastructure are taken as variables of community physical environment; educational attainment, health condition, vulnerable group and risk awareness are taken as variables of community population characteristic; government investment & management, leadership and community self-governance are taken as variables of institutional factor. Furthermore, theoretical hypotheses are proposed.Thirdly, an empirical test is conducted for the model of factors affecting the disaster resilience in urban communities through descriptive statistical analysis, reliability & validity test, correlation analysis and structural equation model (SEM) analysis with the help of software SPSS and AMOS based on a questionnaire survey. Conclusions are reached as follows:community social capital has significant influence on the community's pre-warning & response ability, post-disaster recovery ability and learning & adapting ability; community economic capital has significant influence on the community's pre-warning & response ability, post-disaster recovery ability and learning & adapting ability; community physical environment has significant influence on the community's post-disaster recovery ability; community population characteristic has significant influence on the community's post-disaster recovery ability; institutional factor has significant influence on the community's pre-warning & response ability, post-disaster recovery ability and learning & adapting ability. At last, several proposals for improving and optimizing the construction of disaster elasticity in urban communities are made based on above analyses, and the major orientation for future research is indicated according to the deficiencies of this research.Taking urban community as the object and disaster resilience as the content, this paper provides a new perspective for the study of public safety and crisis management. Combining the results of empirical research and quantitative analysis, a model of factors affecting disaster resilience in urban communities is proposed to more accurately present the factors affecting the resilience of disasters in urban communities as well as the mechanism of action, thus improving the existing model's accuracy and practicability. The application of qualitative and quantitative methods such as in-depth interview, case study and structural equation model enrich the means to study community disaster resilience, thereby promoting the research level of community disaster resilience.