Measuring natural hazard-related disasters through self-reports

This article reports on the development and validation of a cumulative measure of exposure to natural hazard-related disasters (2013–2017) at the area level, and an individuallevel measure of disaster impact using data from the Longitudinal Cohort Study on the Filipino Child and linked data from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT). Exposure to multiple natural hazard-related disasters will become more common due to climate change. Caregiver reports of cumulative exposure to disasters had statistically significant associations with disasters reported by neighborhood officials and with disasters in EM-DAT.

The study demonstrates that individual self-reports, when aggregated at the area level, can be a valid and reliable measure of disaster exposure. This has direct implications for researchers. In the same way that ‘‘ecometric’’ measures of neighborhood social capital and disorder heralded an explosion of research into neighborhood-level measures of social capital and physical disorder, there is potential for our methodology to be adopted by other research groups to generate more nuanced measures of people’s disaster exposure than are currently available from objective measures such as EM-DAT.