Abstract
This paper contributes to the growing body of social science research on population displacement from disasters by examining the social determinants of evacuation behavior. It seeks to clarify the effects of race and socioeconomic status on evacuation outcomes vis-a-vis previous research on Hurricane Katrina, and it expands upon prior research on evacuation behavior more generally by differentiating non-evacuees according to their reasons for staying. This research draws upon the Harvard Medical School Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group’s 2006 survey of individuals affected by Hurricane Katrina. Using these data, we develop two series of logistic regression models. The first set of models predicts the odds that respondents evacuated prior to the storm, relative to delayed- or non-evacuation; the second group of models predicts the odds that non-evacuees were unable to evacuate relative to having chosen to stay. We find that black and low-education respondents were least likely to evacuate prior to the storm and among non-evacuees, most likely to have been unable to evacuate. Respondents’ social networks, information attainment, and geographic location also affected evacuation behavior. We discuss these findings and outline directions for future research.
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Notes
As justified later in the paper and in footnote #10, we use a measure of education as an indicator of household socioeconomic status. We refer to “education effects” when discussing the particular findings of our statistical models, but refer to “socioeconomic status” when discussing the conceptualization of our research question and referring to previous literature on evacuation behavior, which has utilized multiple indicators of socioeconomic status.
An extensive review by Dash and Gladwin (2007) demonstrates that previous research on this topic has examined the effect of numerous other characteristics of evacuees and non-evacuees (e.g., gender), as well as the psychosocial dimensions of the evacuation process.
Gallup Poll #2005-45.
Household evacuation strategies were categorized according to (a) the timing of evacuation and (b) whether or not household members remained united or divided.
Both Elliott and Pais (2006) and Haney et al. (2007) report a number of other statistically significant factors in their models. Elliot and Pais find significant gender differences in some comparisons. Haney et al. observe significant differences in evacuation strategies according to employment, religion, and sex. Because they do not interact with or otherwise affect their findings regarding race and socioeconomic status, we exclude this from our discussion for the sake of brevity.
“Affected areas” are defined as those counties and parishes that were declared eligible for “individual assistance” by FEMA.
Adjustments were made for overlap in the sampling frames (see Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group 2006 for details).
To easily interpret odds ratios <1.000, one should invert the coefficient \(\left( {\frac{1}{\beta }} \right)\). The quotient expresses the degree to which respondents in group k of variable x i were less likely to experience outcome Y 1 than those in the reference group, in the same terms as coefficients above 1.000.
Although an income variable was also available, we found that education and income were significantly and strongly correlated (r = 0.417). We chose to use education and exclude the income variable for two primary reasons. First, the income variable reports household income, which is not appropriate given that our outcome and all other explanatory variables are individual-level indicators. Second, income is more prone to reporting bias than education.
We consider responses of 0–4 to either of the following questions “low” and responses of 5+ “high”: (1) “about how many friends or relatives in the county/parish were you close enough to that you could talk about your private feelings without feeling embarrassed?”; and (2) “about how many friends or relatives who did not live in the country/parish were you close enough to that you could talk about your private feelings without feeling embarrassed?” The median responses to these questions were 5.0 and 4.0, respectively, therefore 4.0 provides a reasonable central point around which to assign respondents to these categories.
Although some respondents’ social network classification may reflect socially insignificant county/parish boundary lines, we have no reason to believe that the distribution of such boundary effects is non-random across the four social network categories or any other variable in our statistical models.
We also consider the possibility that information attainment reflects the respondent’s connection to (isolation from) mainstream society.
This variable consists of three categories: we consider 0–4 recommendations “low” information attainment, 5–15 “medium”, and 16 or greater “high.” These thresholds distribute respondents as evenly as possible across the three categories.
This includes systematic reporting biases.
Due to confidentiality restrictions, we were unable to obtain respondents’ zip codes of residence from the Harvard study to link community- and individual-level data. We would have liked, for example, to examine whether living in neighborhoods with high poverty or nativity rates affected the odds that an individual evacuated and the reason for not evacuating.
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Acknowledgments
This article benefitted greatly from the insights of Max Pfeffer, Scott Sanders, Laura Hathaway, and anonymous reviewers. The authors alone are responsible for mistakes of any kind. This research was supported by the Cornell Population Center, Cornell Population and Development Program, and USDA multi-state research project W-2001 “Population Dynamics and Change: Aging, Ethnicity and Land Use Change in Rural Communities,” administered by the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station project 159-6808.
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Thiede, B.C., Brown, D.L. Hurricane Katrina: Who Stayed and Why?. Popul Res Policy Rev 32, 803–824 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9302-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-013-9302-9