Religious meaning-making and prosocial action among disaster response volunteers

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how religious beliefs influence meaning-making and prosocial action among community responders. Fourteen non-professional rescue and relief volunteers were interviewed post the 2018-19 floods in Kerala, India. The study adopts Braun and Clarke's Thematic Analysis with a critical realist approach. Several participants viewed the disaster as an act of God but simultaneously engaged in scientific sense-making; religious meaning-making offers a means of coming to terms, while rational causal attributions promote mitigation measures. Suffering was seen as a test of faith. Many volunteers experienced the disaster as a reminder that re-oriented them to piety and iterated human vulnerability. Although the disaster evoked a lack of control, they found meaning in the service of others and viewed their actions with humility and gratitude. Service was often both intrinsically meaningful and religiously motivated. The findings underscore the role of religious meaning-making in promoting prosocial action and community resilience post disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious meaning-making
• prosocial action
• disaster response volunteers
• Kerala flood
• thematic analysis

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Ministry of Education for the funding. We thank the journal's two anonymous reviewers for their time and helpful feedback and the Editor for facilitating a speedy review process. We also thank Nidhi Surendranath for her insightful comments and feedback on the paper. We are indebted to the participants for their generosity with their time and for sharing their stories with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors are not disposed to share the supporting data as participants’ consent for public sharing is not available. Additionally, the ethics approval for the research was obtained in the condition that the interview data will be accessible only by the principal investigator.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the doctoral fellowship granted by the Ministry of Education, Government of India.