Quantifying Social Vulnerability: A methodology for ... - EarthByte

have challenged the psychometric paradigm, it has demonstrated that perceived riskcan be quantified and predicted in the demonstrated situations [63, 25, 37]. It mustalso be acknowledged that a comparison between perceived risk to natural hazards andactual risk measured after an impact has not been explored using the psychometricparadigm. However, in situations where actual risk is often unknown or untested, suchas the risk from natural hazards, perceived risk may be considered a substitute foractual risk. Therefore, any investigation into quantitative assessments of vulnerabilityto natural hazards, where the impact of the hazard is untested, should take into accountthe perception of the natural hazard risk.2.3 Questionnaire developmentThe development of the questionnaire is based on asking participants to rank the vulnerabilityof ten hypothetical individuals, where vulnerability is defined as ‘a person’sability to recover’, to various natural hazard impacts. For the purpose of this study,this rank will be considered a measure of social vulnerability. The individuals will beranked according to the participant’s perception of the impact of the natural hazardas per the indicators used in Table 1.4. Essentially, it is a measure of the perceivedcapacity of a person to recover from an impact event given the variables presented.2.3.1 Collection of national dataIn order to develop hypothetical individuals that are as realistic as possible, that is,that they resemble an urban Australian community, reliable data sources are required.At the time of the data source collection for this study, the 1996 Census undertakenby the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was the most current and comprehensivedata source. While most of the data was obtained from the ABS Census, not all of the15 indicators are represented in the Census, as noted in the section below. The datasources are used to provide a fair representation of Australians that could be exposedto a natural hazard. The data and context for 12 of the indicators are shown in thefollowing figures. The rational for their selection is also discussed. The two hazard indicatorsand one vulnerability indicator, House Insurance, do not have cross-correlateddata for representation in figures, so their context and rational is explained as follows:Indicator 9: House InsuranceApproximately one-third of Australian houses are uninsured, for both house and/orcontents insurance. Insurance becomes a significant factor in a person’s ability tofinance repairs or rebuild after a natural hazard impact [8].Indicator 14: InjuriesThe HAZUS risk assessment program has an injury classification scale, which hasbeen slightly modified for this study. Four classes have still been used, however, theclass of ’killed or mortally injured’ has been replaced with ’no injuries’. The fourclasses are therefore: 1)No injury, 2)Basic medical treatment without hospitalisation,3)Hospitalisation but expected to recover and 4)Hospitalisation with life-threatening20