Surrogate measures to assess mobility of people as a resilience indicator in disaster management: an exploratory study in southeastern Sri Lanka

Abstract

Understanding social resilience can assist in the formulation of disaster management policies to help communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. However, direct social resilience measurement methods such as household surveys are not always a practical option as they are a time- and resource-exhaustive process. Existing measures mainly utilize publicly available census data, which often provide a poor and outdated assessment of current social resilience status. Another limitation includes a failure to capture multiple facets of indicators that are process-oriented and dynamic in nature such as mobility of people. These challenges can be addressed by employing a surrogate approach. Surrogates are alternative measures to depict the target indicator. The surrogate approach can capture key facets of a target indicator, which can be used as potential measures for the target indicator. A framework to conceptualize the surrogate approach is presented, and operationalized using a case study approach on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka to identify surrogates to measure mobility of people as a resilience indicator. Six higher-order themes were identified as potential surrogates to measure mobility of people in a disaster context. The approach proposed to methodically identify potential surrogates and their measurement protocols can help to improve the current knowledge base and understanding of complex interrelationships of social resilience.