Social capital and collective efficacy for disaster resilience: Connecting individuals with communities and vulnerability with resilience in hurricane-prone communities in Florida

This dissertation explores the relationship between individual and community resilience and social vulnerability in hurricane-prone communities in the United States using social capital and collective efficacy as conceptual grounding.;I pursue several specific research questions within this broad framework. 1) Individual-level social capital: How do individuals understand and leverage their informal (family and friends) and formal (organizations) social capital for disaster situations? What specific attributes of individuals and their networks affect their perceptions of social capital resources before a disaster occurs? 2) Individual-level perceptions of collective efficacy: How is collective efficacy for disasters understood and described by individual residents of a community? How does this understanding compare and contrast with routine (i.e., non-disaster) perspectives of collective efficacy? 3) Community-level social capital: How does disaster-specific social capital operate at a community level? What are the perceived attributes and effects of different forms of social capital on a community's overall disaster resilience? 4) Community-level perceptions of collective efficacy: How do organizational representatives understand and describe the disaster-specific collective efficacy in their communities? What attributes of their communities support and constrain disaster-specific collective efficacy?;Disaster social capital at the individual level describes the personal social networks of family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and organizations who individuals perceive as able provide assistance for disaster-related activities. My results highlight the following five main findings related to disaster social capital. First, respondents' disaster-specific social networks are limited in size. Many respondents perceived a small number of social capital ties as able to provide resources for disaster situations, and this result differed based on the resource considered (financial or nonfinancial) and by county. Second, family ties and geographically localized ties are prominent in these networks. Third, taken together with indicators of social vulnerability, disaster social capital involves a complex process of network size, composition, and resource needs and availability that influence the perception of potential social ties to activate in disasters. This process has implications for individual resilience, based on the resources an individual has and what they can receive from their networks. Fourth, this primary data on disaster social networks is positively correlated, but only weakly, to common measures of routine social capital. Fifth, nearly half of the respondents in this study lack formal social capital ties to community organizations. Few of these individuals perceived these formal social capital ties as useful in a disaster situation and instead would rely on family and friends first.;At the community-level, the practice of social capital among community organizations varies. In Leon County, their disaster social capital is formalized in a network of government and nongovernmental organizations with varying degrees of involvement. I created a six tier typology to describe the levels of connection between different organizations in Leon County: Disaster Core, Conduits of Emergency Services, Social Service Semi-periphery, Faithful and Financial Periphery, External Assistance, and The Disconnected. Involvement in this disaster-specific organizational social capital network was perceived to have three main benefits related to disaster resilience: improve disaster response, improve organizational capacity to survive a disaster, and improve organizational capacity to assist their clients or members during a disaster. In contrast, Dixie County lacked a formal disaster-specific organizational network, and only two local government organizations collaborated regularly on disaster concerns. Other organizations in the area were expected to emerge in the aftermath of a disaster and assist with response and recovery as they could. The lack of formalized disaster social capital in Dixie County was attributed to the limited capacity of nongovernmental organizations, the lack of large disasters that require more than what local emergency management could handle, and confusion as to what nongovernmental organizations could offer or gain from being involved in such a network. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).