Measuring outcomes in a community resilience program: A new metric for evaluating results at the household level
Community resilience programs require metrics for evaluation but none exist for measuring outcomes at the household and neighborhood level. In this paper, the authors develop and describe a new index, the LACCDR index of community resilience, to examine how resilience varied across communities at baseline, prior to implementation of the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR).
The authors surveyed 4700 adult residents in the sixteen LACCDR communities in English, Spanish and Korean. Each of the survey domains was selected a priori as outcome indicators aligned to the theoretical levers of community resilience. Survey questions were drawn and adapted from published studies and national surveys.
Factor analysis demonstrated five separate factors composed from 18 items and explaining 46.7% of the variance. The factors were characterized as community engagement, emergency supplies, communication with neighbors, civic engagement, and collective efficacy. Baseline results for the 16 communities are provided. The conclusions are that the LACCDR community resilience index can be used to measure resilience program outcomes at the neighborhood and household levels.