Measuring psychological resilience to disasters: are evidence-based indicators an achievable goal?
Open accessAbstract
Despite rising interest on the concept of societal resilience and its measurement, little has been done to provide operational indicators. Importantly, an evidence-based approach to assess the suitability of indicators remains unexplored. Furthermore few approaches that exist do not investigate indicators of psychological resilience, which is emerging as an important component of societal resilience to disasters. Disasters are events which overwhelm local capacities, often producing human losses, injury and damage to the affected communities. As climate hazards and disasters are likely to increase in the coming decades, strengthening the capacity of societies to withstand these shocks and recover quickly is vital. In this review, we search the Web of Knowledge to summarize the evidence on indicators of psychological resilience to disasters and provided a qualitative assessment of six selected studies. We find that an evidence-based approach using features from systematic reviews is useful to compile, select and assess the evidence and elucidate robust indicators. We conclude that strong social support received after a disaster is associated with an increased psychological resilience whereas a female gender is connected with a decrease in the likelihood of a resilient outcome. These results are consistent across disaster settings and cultures and are representative of approximately 13 million disaster-exposed civilians of adult age. An approach such as this that collects and evaluates evidence will allow indicators of resilience to be much more revealing and useful in the future. They will provide a robust basis to prioritize indicators to act upon through intersectoral policies and post-disaster public health interventions.
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Social support is one of the most impactful and consistent resilience factors following natural disasters.
“Connectedness, the third “C,” refers to the need for human contact and support, which is consistent with empirical evidence documenting social support as one of the most impactful and consistent resilience factors following natural disasters (e.g., Rodriguez-Llanes, Vos, & Guha-Sapir, 2013).”
From Stress and coping in the time of COVID-19: Pathways to resilience and recovery (2020) · cites this paper as Rodriguez-Llanes, Vos, & Guha-Sapir, 2013
The Results (‘Indicators of psychological resilience’) identify social support as one of the most consistent indicators across the six disaster studies: all five studies testing its association found it a significant predictor. The paper does not compare effect sizes or establish that social support is among the most impactful factors, so that part of the claim goes beyond the evidence presented. (LLM, conf=0.83)
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- Authors
- Rodriguez-Llanes, J. M., Vos, F., & Guha-Sapir, D.
- Affiliations
- UCLouvain (BE)
- Venue
- Environmental Health
- Published
- 2013-12
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 115-115
- ISSN
- 1476-069X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3893382
- OpenAlex
- W2158675519
- Cited by
- 146
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 1.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Environmental Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- European Commission (283201)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Disaster Management and Resilience
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Resilience and Mental Health
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research
- Keywords
- psychological resilience, disaster resilience, social resilience, resilience indicators, social support, gender differences, disaster recovery, climate hazards
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Disasters, Female, Goals, Humans, Male, Public Health, Sex Characteristics, Social Support, Resilience, Psychological
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