Disaster resilience and recovery have been studied from a variety of perspectives including sociology, policy implementation, decision-making, engineering, geography and urban planning. For this reason, there is a wide range of definitions of resilience and recovery, and determining appropriate indicators of recoveryand resilience is a challenge for both researchers and practitioners. We begin this paper with a discussion of the varying definitions of recovery, vulnerability and resilience and how they have been utilized in each field. In order to assess what indicators can be used to measure both resilience and recovery, we performed an in-depth content analysis on definitions and indicators from existing literature. We analyzed articles from 2000 to 2010 in four disaster-focused journals that include perspectives of engineers, social scientists, practitioners and economists. Articles were selected by a keyword search and analyzed for resilience and recovery indicators using an emergent coding scheme. We classified the indicators of community resilience into infrastructure, social, economic and institutional categories. Recovery indicators were categorized as social, economic, environmental and infrastructure. Researchers can use these results for future studies of causal factors and recovery indicators. Similarly, practitioners will be able to have a condensed opinion of experts in the field of disaster recoveryand planning.
Jordan, E. and Javernick-Will, A. (2012). "Measuring Community Resilience and Recovery: A Content Analysis of Indicators." Construction Research Congress. West Lafayette, IN. Best Paper Award