What if FEMA and researchers worked together on long-term recovery?
Oh the cohort study we could build...
My colleagues and I at the Urban Institute were recently invited to speak with the White House about housing and climate intersections. During my portion of the briefing, a top priority I described was greater collaboration on research with FEMA. This has been a wishful theme among disaster researchers for decades. FEMA (and more recently the Department of Homeland Security) is famously protective of personally identifiable information and doesn’t have the kinds of research tie-ins that other agencies like the Department of Transportation supports. This means that while FEMA has access to nearly every individual and household who was affected by every federally-declared disaster event through their enrollment in the Individual Assistance Program, they do not share that data with researchers who may want to observe recovery in real-time. The result is that researchers often:
Scramble to develop their own survey samples, at great cost and difficulty. This is why the literature on recovery is heavily tilted towards single-event case studies; or
Produce large-scale observational studies using post-event data that is aggregated up to a larger geography, without any of the nuance that comes with having access to individual households.
Let us imagine for a second, however, that FEMA and DHS wanted to work collaboratively with the research community to study the long-term recovery of households - what factors speed things up, or slow things down, and what leads to more resilient outcomes. After every declared disaster, a team of researchers (representing the best-and-the-brightest from across the disaster research world) would use the Individual Assistance list to enrolls volunteers for a long-term study. The team would use validated and pre-approved research instruments (i.e. surveys or interview guides) that they have collaboratively developed with FEMA and other supporting agencies like HUD. Over time they would have the most powerful cohort study on disaster ever assembled, with thousands of disaster survivors being tracked over years and according to factors like housing, displacement, health and well-being, schooling, employment etc. They would observe enough households from across different events, geographies, policy contexts, etc. to learn what matters, and when it matters, for successful recovery and long-term resiliency. It would also be extremely valuable for understanding how shifts in policy and programs - like the recent changes to IA - are impacting the lives of disaster survivors. Study participants would be compensated for their time, and the data and findings would inform FEMA’s own program design and delivery approaches. The findings wouldn't just benefit FEMA, either - they would also inform the work of thousands of philanthropies, community based organizations, long-term recovery groups, and faith-based organizations that are part of the whole of community during recovery. They would also be shared with elected officials at every level who want to proactively improve our disaster management system.
None of this is new or innovative, at least to researchers working in fields like public health and education - where large cohort studies have been ongoing for decades and have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the world. Organizations like the Urban Institute and their academic research partners work with personally sensitive data all the time, and have layers-upon-layers of ethical, legal and technological safeguards to ensure that people’s privacy is protected.
We’ve relied for far too long on people’s negative experiences prompting policy reform. A proper cohort study of long-term recovery would put us on our front foot. With a willingness to collaborate we could be enrolling our first study participants this year. Let’s make this happen.