Understanding Community Behaviors and Attitudes for Resilience: Developing a Scalable Survey Methodology

​Principal Investigator: Cynthia Chen, Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
​Co-Principal Investigator: Daniel Abramson, Associate Professor, Department of Urban Design and Planning
Project Duration: 48 months
​Project Budget (Federal UTC Funds): $220,000
Project Budget (Cost-share): $110,000
Institution: University of Washington

Abstract
The overarching goal of the project is to understand and model ways in which we can leverage unique – and interconnected – physical and social characteristics of place to enhance community adaptive capacity in response to disruptions.  This first phase (one-year) sets the stage for that line of inquiry by exploring and assessing the state of the field and best practices regarding attitudinal surveys in the areas of both resilience and transportation planning. The goal is to conduct a thorough review of the literature pertinent to resilience, transportation choices, and survey methodologies and develop a scalable survey methodology that can be applied to many communities to identify their unique community resources, which will enable their community adaptive capacity. ​This project will stimulate new ways of thinking about the interaction of physical systems (such as multi-modal transportation networks) and social systems (such as community organizations or families of  children attending a neighborhood school) in a community resilience context, expanding beyond the convention of modeling humans primarily as demand on physical systems and vulnerabilities (as opposed to unique community assets) as the sole focus for resilience planning.  The survey methodology will create an original resource for designing an attitude- and values- based assessment of community resilience. This data set will complement future project phases that analyze interdependent physical and social networks as contributing to resilience.​

Research Products and Implementation

Scope of Work (coming soon)

​​Final Report (coming soon)

​Research Brief ​​(coming soon)