Emergent social identity and observing social support predict social support provided by survivors in a disaster: solidarity in the 2010 Chile earthquake

By J. Drury, Rupert Brown, Roberto González, Daniel Miranda. 2016

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Survivors of disasters commonly provide each other with social support, but the social-psychological processes behind such solidarity behaviours have not been fully explicated. We describe a survey of 1240 adults affected by the 2010 Chile earthquake to examine the importance of two factors: observing others providing social support and social identification with other survivors. As expected, emotional social support was associated with social identification, which in turn was predicted by disaster exposure through common fate. Observing others' supportive behaviour predicted both providing emotional social support and providing coordinated instrumental social support. Expected support was a key mediator of these relationships and also predicted collective efficacy. There was also an interaction: social identification moderated the relationship between observing and providing social support. These findings serve to develop the social identity account of mass emergency behaviour and add value to disaster research by showing the relevance of concepts from collective action.

Subfields: Communication, Emergency Medical Services, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af3824fb51d8b048292708eb8079262252d0256f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Emergency Medical Services

1. J. Drury
2. Richard Williams
3. Evangelos Ntontis
4. R. Amlȏt
5. G. Rubin

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Drury
2. Richard Williams
3. Clifford Stevenson
4. Evangelos Ntontis
5. R. Amlȏt
6. G. Rubin
7. Niamh McNamara
8. Martijn van Zomeren

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, methodology): “Coordinated community help during the COVID-19 pandemic was measured with an adaptation of the Provided and Received Coordinated Social Support Scale (Drury et al., 2016).”
• The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review (2018, background): “In the Maule earthquake study described above (Drury et al., 2016), we took measures of participants’ observations of others’ behaviour.”
• Emergent social identities in a flood: Implications for community psychosocial resilience (2018, background): “Similarly, in the Chile earthquake and tsunami in 2010 (Drury et al., 2016), a survey found that common fate due to the widespread impact of the disaster predicted shared social identity with other people affected by the event.”