Community social capital and individual disaster preparedness in immigrants and Canadian-born individuals: an ecological perspective

Abstract

Psychological research on the predictors of disaster preparedness has mainly focused on individual-level factors, although the social environment plays an important role. Our goal is to provide a systemic perspective to help improve risk communication and risk management for natural disaster risks. We examined how community-level social capital related to individual-level disaster preparedness in immigrants compared with Canadian-born individuals. We characterised participants’ communities’ social capital by conceptually linking two national surveys using postal codes. We performed sequential linear multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between community social capital and individual disaster preparedness. Results revealed three components of social capital: societal trust, interaction with friends, and neighbourhood contact. Societal trust positively predicted the extent to which immigrants and Canadian-born individuals knew someone who would search for them post-disaster. Interestingly, results revealed that Canadian-born individuals were more likely to uptake emergency planning when living in a community with strong societal trust, while the reverse was true for immigrants. Results suggest that some components of social capital may have an effect on certain preparedness behaviours. Societal trust could have both positive and negative effects on emergency planning depending on individuals’ immigrant status. Risk communication and risk management should consider social capital as part of the framework for effective disaster preparedness.

Keywords:

• Social capital
• disaster preparedness
• immigrants
• natural disasters
• Canada
• risk communication and management

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr. Tim Dugas, Dr. Michelle Turner, Dr. Veronika Huta, and the members of the Groupe d’Analyse Psychosociale de la Santé.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Social capital indicators: Crime rates, suicide rates, social cohesion, trust, social network, reciprocity, community organisations, activities and facilities, volunteering, political involvement, local leadership, local business sponsorship, neighbourhood contact and interaction, political involvement, community engagement, fairness, and voter turnout.

2 Five respondents did not report their country-of-birth.

3 Detailed list of items used is available as supplemental material upon request.

4 We used varimax rotation to reduce potential issue of multicollinearity. PCA models generated using varimax rotation and oblimin rotation were similar in number of components, component loadings, and communalities.

5 Although the interaction term (Immigrant Status x Neighbourhood Support) and immigrant indicator showed potential multicollinearity (Tolerance ≤ .10, VIF ≥ 10.0), further examination revealed that this was due product of the interaction terms. We did not consider this as problematic because multicollinearity does not affect the coefficient estimates and overall model (Williams 2015).

6 Descriptives of variables are available as supplemental material upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This research project was funded by the McLaughlin Chair in Psychosocial Aspects of Health and Risk, Employment and Social Development Canada, and Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to Dr. Lemyre; and the Canada Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Industrial Research Chair in Risk Science to Dr. Krewski. Ms. Yong was supported by the University of Ottawa and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. This research was also supported by funds to the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and Statistics Canada. Although the research and analysis are based on data from Statistics Canada, the opinions expressed do not represent the views of Statistics Canada.