Disaster Resilience from a Sociological Perspective: Exploring Three Italian Earthquakes as Models for Disaster Resilience Planning

Natural disasters traumatize individuals, disrupt families, and destabilize communities.Surviving these harrowing events calls for courage, tenacity, and resilience. Professional planning requires specific types of knowledge of how people meet and cope with extreme challenges.

Disaster Resilience from a Sociological Perspective examines three major earthquakes occurring in Italy over a fourteen - year period for a well-documented analysis of populations' responses to and recovery from disaster, the social variables involved, and the participation of public agencies. This timely volume reviews sociological definitions and models of disaster, identifying core features of vulnerability and multiple levels of individual and social resilience. The analysis contrasts the structural and supportive roles of Italy's civil protection and civil defense services in emergency planning and management as examples of what the author terms professional resilience. And testimony from earthquake survivors and volunteers gives voice to the social processes characteristic of disaster. Among the areas covered:

• Social context for concepts of disaster, vulnerability, risk, and resilience
• Types of resilience: a multidimensional analysis, focused on a physical, ecological, and ecosystem perspective
• Findings from three earthquakes: loss, hope, and community.
• Two systems of organizational response to emergencies
• Toward a relational approach to disaster resilience planning
• Plus helpful tables, methodological notes, and appendices

For researchers in disaster preparedness, psychology, and sociology, Disaster Resilience from a Sociological Perspective raises--and addresses--salient questions about people and communities in crisis, and how studying them can improve preparedness in an uncertain future.