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Population and Environment
Published in: Population and Environment 3/2017

19-05-2016 | Original Paper

Emplaced social vulnerability to technological disasters: Southeast Louisiana and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Authors: Michael R. Cope, Tim Slack

Published in: Population and Environment | Issue 3/2017

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Abstract

We examine the relationship between emplaced social vulnerability and impacts on mental health following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Through joint analysis of data from Community Oil Spill Survey and US Census Bureau products, a place-based index of social vulnerability is developed to examine how emplaced characteristics engender unique susceptibility to the disaster, with specific attention on the influence of natural resource employment and community sentiment. Results show negative mental health impacts to be more pronounced at baseline compared to later time points and that shifts in negative mental health were not uniform for localities with divergent levels of social vulnerability, where places identified with high levels of social vulnerability the effectiveness of attributes associated with resilience were muted, while the effect of vulnerability attributes was amplified. These findings contribute to the understanding of vulnerability as a multidimensional concept shaped by the social attributes that characterize people and places.
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Footnotes
1
See Norris et al. (2008) for an in-depth discussion of community resilience as it applies to disasters.
 
2
Analysts need to be cautious about conflating the concepts of community attachment and emplaced social vulnerability. While community attachment emphasizes an individual’s sentiments about their community, emplaced social vulnerability is concerned with the biophysical, social, economic, and cultural aspects of place that potentially predispose (or disincline) risks.
 
3
Studies often use the raw number of years resident in the community to measure length of residence, but doing so conflates the effects of age and length of residence (see Cope et al. 2015; Flaherty and Brown 2010).
 
4
To compare across models, differences in regression coefficients are tested for using the z test. More specifically, drawing on the work of Clogg et al. (1995), the formula for this statistical test is as follows:
$$Z = \frac{{b_{1} - b_{2} }}{{\sqrt {SEb_{1}^{2} + SEb_{2}^{2} } }}.$$
 
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Metadata
Title
Emplaced social vulnerability to technological disasters: Southeast Louisiana and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Authors
Michael R. Cope
Tim Slack
Publication date
19-05-2016
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Population and Environment / Issue 3/2017
Print ISSN: 0199-0039
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7810
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-016-0257-8

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