Emergent social identities in a flood: Implications for community psychosocial resilience

By Evangelos Ntontis, J. Drury, R. Amlȏt, G. Rubin, Richard Williams. 2018

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the mobilisation of pre-existing networks is crucial in psychosocial resilience in disasters, shared identities can also emerge in the absence of such previous bonds, due to survivors sharing a sense of “common fate”. Common fate seems to operate in “sudden-impact” disasters (e.g., bombings), but to our knowledge no research has explored social identity processes in “rising-tide” incidents. We interviewed an opportunity sample of 17 residents of York, UK, who were involved in the 2015-16 floods. Using thematic and discourse analysis we investigated residents’ experiences of the floods, and the strategic function that invocations of community identities perform. We show how shared community identities emerged (e.g., due to shared problems, shared goals, perceptions of vulnerability, and collapse of previous group boundaries), and show how they acted as the basis of social support (both given and expected). The findings serve to further develop the social identity model of collective psychosocial resilience in “rising-tide” disasters. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Emergency Medical Services, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae3c507a5e590afac1dd5c1ff222dbcf88c36599

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In Sociology and Political Science

1. Niamh McNamara
2. Clifford Stevenson

Citations in the corpus

• The mental health benefits of community helping during crisis: Coordinated helping, community identification and sense of unity during the COVID‐19 pandemic (2021, background): “Community responses have a critical role to play during times of crisis, reinforcing a sense of common fate, shared identity and community support (Ntontis et al., 2018).”