Exploring resiliency factors of older african american katrina survivors

Through this qualitative study the author explores the resiliency processes demonstrated by older African American Hurricane Katrina survivors who relocated in the aftermath of the storm and were consequently faced with difficult challenges. In-depth interviews were used to assess the multidimensional characteristics of resiliency that enabled these older adults to deal with adversity. These findings highlight distinct processes reflecting resiliency: (a) Trusting in a higher power, and the importance of (b) living in the present, (c) activating resources, (d) creating community, and (e) doing for others. The author concludes this study with suggestions on how these findings may inform social work practice with older adults.     

Utilizing Compassion Fatigue Education in Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina

Compassion Fatigue is a state that includes the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This text reviews events following the Hurricane Ivan and Katrina disasters and how Compassion Fatigue education helped to identify and ameliorate symptoms of the problem. I worked in a community center in the Pensacola area for one week following Ivan and in a shelter in my residential area of Houma, Louisiana for two months following Katrina. Examples of traumatic stories and coping with my own secondary stress are given. Implications include education regarding CF for all mental health professionals, especially during and following work in disasters or with populations of the traumatized.     

President Bush's major post-Katrina speeches: Enhancing image repair discourse theory applied to the public sector

When Hurricane Katrina swept the Gulf Coast, President Bush's newly formed Department of Homeland Security received its first test and failed. In Katrina's aftermath, Bush not only had to manage one of the nation's worst natural disasters, but also had to quell political backlash about the federal government's response to Katrina. This study examines: (a) how Bush presented the federal response to Katrina in his speeches; (b) how Bush responded to the public's criticism in his speeches; and (c) how effective Bush's speeches were in repairing his tarnished image.     

Help or hype: Symbolic or behavioral communication during Hurricane Katrina

Public relations professionals increasingly rely on the World Wide Web to communicate with their publics on a variety of issues, including the corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts the organization has undertaken. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there is an opportunity to discover how the Best 100 Global Brands used their corporate websites and the power of their brand equity to help the victims of the disaster, as well as to communicate their own CSR efforts. Results show that 51% of these Top 100 firms had messages on their homepages about Hurricane Katrina, and 86% of those firms made donations totaling $105,000,000. The remaining 14% of firms exhibited symbolic communication only, with links to philanthropic organizations aiding rescue efforts.     

Disrupted by disaster: shared experiences of student registered nurse anesthetists affected by hurricane Katrina

The purpose of this focused ethnography was to describe the shared experiences of student registered nurse anesthetists (SRNAs) whose senior year of education and training was disrupted by Hurricane Katrina, as well as to determine the storm's psychosocial impact on them. A convenience sample of 10 former SRNAs participated in focus groups that were audiorecorded, transcribed, and qualitatively analyzed. Three major themes emerged from the study: Seriousness of Urgency, Managing Uncertainty, and Stability Equaled Relief. The themes represented how the SRNAs appraised and coped with the stressful events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The psychosocial impact of Hurricane Katrina on the SRNAs resulted mainly in temporary increased alcohol consumption and short-term anxiety. One person started smoking. The results of this study should serve as a guide to formulate policies regarding the education of SRNAs during and immediately after a disaster and to provide a framework for future disaster studies regarding SRNAs.     

Responding to Hard Times in the “Big Easy”: Meeting the Vocational Needs of Low‐Income African American New Orleans Residents

The already limited vocational prospects of low‐income African Americans in New Orleans were further devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill added to the devastation, highlighting the continued vulnerability of New Orleanians seeking employment. As a result, opportunities persist for vocational practitioners to lend their expertise. In this article, the post‐Katrina vocational situation of low‐income African American residents is conceptualized using Bronfenbrenner's (1977) ecological model. Furthermore, needed interventions are described at each level of this ecological model.     

“Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer”: Food as Cultural Performance in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures, hundreds of thousands of volunteers went to New Orleans to help rebuild. Food was quickly used as a way to welcome volunteers, to compensate them for their hard work, to celebrate progress in rebuilding community, and to interact with others. In time, however, the giving and consuming of food was renegotiated. Volunteers coming to New Orleans expected meals representative of New Orleans's foodways. This article looks at the cultural performance of food in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In particular, I analyze the symbolic exchanges of food in what I call performances of reciprocity and performances of solidarity. This study adds to the burgeoning work in symbolic interaction on food, especially as it pertains to progressive spaces of cultural politics.     

When the levee breaks: treating adolescents and families in the aftermath of hurricane katrina

Hurricane Katrina brought to the surface serious questions about the capacity of the public health system to respond to community-wide disaster. The storm and its aftermath severed developmentally protective family and community ties; thus its consequences are expected to be particularly acute for vulnerable adolescents. Research confirms that teens are at risk for a range of negative outcomes under conditions of life stress and family disorganization. Specifically, the multiple interacting risk factors for substance abuse in adolescence may be compounded when families and communities have experienced a major trauma. Further, existing service structures and treatments for working with young disaster victims may not address their risk for co-occurring substance abuse and traumatic stress reactions because they tend to be individually or peer group focused, and fail to consider the multi-systemic aspects of disaster recovery. This article proposes an innovative family-based intervention for young disaster victims, based on an empirically supported model for adolescent substance abuse, Multidimensional Family Therapy (MDFT; Liddle, 2002). Outcomes and mechanisms of the model's effects are being investigated in a randomized clinical trial with clinically referred substance-abusing teens in a New Orleans area community impacted by Hurricane Katrina.     

A Quiet Suffering: Some Notes on the Sociology of Suffering1

Despite a recent increase in attention within the social sciences, suffering remains for the most part outside of the purview of sociologists. In this essay, I explore the possibilities for a sociology of suffering by briefly interrogating suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, the epicenter of the hurricane and the federal levee failures.     

Gender and Race in the History of Housing Policy and Research: From Industrialization to Hurricane Katrina

This study examines how gender and race have shaped housing policy and research. In it, I analyze the history of housing policies and practices in the United States. Concurrently, I analyze the academic literature related to housing throughout these same time periods to understand issues relating to women, race, and housing. The primary goal of this article is to understand how intersecting oppressions have disadvantaged various groups of women, especially poor women of color, in the realm of housing. This study also provides a context for examining the problematic housing policies that were developed for those affected by Hurricane Katrina, who were predominately poor people of color. The widespread housing problems faced by Katrina survivors revealed a significant mismatch between housing policies and the needs of populations marginalized by gender, race, and class. I conclude with a call for a renewed consideration of housing issues among gender and race sociologists, and recommendations for studying post-Katrina housing policies.     

A Tale of Two American Cities: Disaster,Class and Citizenship in San Francisco 1906 and New Orleans 2005

Destruction, notes David Harvey, “is often required to make the new urban geography out of the wreckage of the old.”² The history of San Francisco's Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans' public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal. In two historic U.S. disasters we witness the concerted efforts of urban elites to confiscate the spaces of two politically vulnerable populations: the Chinese in 1906 and low‐income African‐Americans in 2005. The widely varying outcomes of these two attempts reveal a good deal about the intersection of calamity, class, race, and citizenship in American history.     

Social Support, Traumatic Events, and Depressive Symptoms Among African Americans

Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships among stress, social support, negative interaction, and mental health in a sample of African American men and women between ages 18 and 54 (N = 591) from the National Comorbidity Study. The study findings indicated that social support decreased the number of depressive symptoms, did not mitigate the effects of stress, and was reduced in response to financial strain. Financial strain and traumatic events were associated with increased negative interaction with relatives and depressive symptoms. The findings verify that stressful and traumatic events have direct influences on levels of depressive symptoms and affect the quality of social interactions and suggest how social interaction processes contribute to mental health.     

Intimate partner violence and Hurricane Katrina: predictors and associated mental health outcomes

This study sought to establish the prevalence and correlates of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization in the 6 months before and after Hurricane Katrina. Participants were 445 married or cohabiting persons who were living in the 23 southernmost counties of Mississippi at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Data for this study were collected as part of a larger, population-based, representative study. The percentage of women reporting psychological victimization increased from 33.6% prior to Hurricane Katrina to 45.2% following Hurricane Katrina (p < .001). The percentage of men reporting psychological victimization increased from 36.7% to 43.1% (p = .01). Reports of physical victimization increased from 4.2% to 8.3% for women (p = .01) but were unchanged for men. Significant predictors of post-Katrina victimization included pre-Katrina victimization, age, educational attainment, marital status, and hurricane-related stressors. Reports of IPV were associated with greater risk of post-Katrina depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. Data from the first population-based study to document IPV following a large-scale natural disaster suggest that IPV may be an important but often overlooked public health concern following disasters.     

Priming Implicit Racism in Television News: Visual and Verbal Limitations on Diversity

We highlight an understudied aspect of racism in television news, implicit racial cues found in the contradictions between visual and verbal messages. We compare three television news broadcasts from the first week after Hurricane Katrina to reexamine race and representation during the disaster. Drawing together insights from interdisciplinary studies of cognition and sociological theories of race and racism, we examine how different combinations of the race of reporters and news sources relate to the priming of implicit racism. We find racial cues that are consistent with stereotypes and myths about African Americans—even in broadcasts featuring black reporters—but which appear only in the context of color‐blind verbal narration. We conclude by drawing attention to the unexpected and seemingly unintended reproduction of racial ideology.     

Waiting in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans: A Case Study of the Tempography of Hyper‐Marginalization

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina residents were forced to wait. Here the state played a familiar role where waiting is used to dominate or subordinate or further marginalize the poor. Residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, however, used waiting as a basis for interacting with other community members and as a way to structure social life. In doing so, they created a timescape of hyper‐marginalization where waiting became normative. In examining this timescape, I conduct a tempography of the neighborhood and distinguish between three forms of waiting as interaction.     

The Aggregation of Political Rhetoric in Zeitoun

While the initial literary and cultural response to 9/11 consisted mostly of domestic narratives of trauma and mourning that avoided explicit political discourse, narrative representations of Hurricane Katrina, from the beginning, have been highly political. This is a profound, if simplistic, inversion: an act of political violence is de-politicized by its cultural response, while a natural disaster is overtly politicized. While the politicization of Hurricane Katrina is clearly, in part, down to the many accusations of negligence and racism that were immediately leveled at the American government after the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, this article argues that a major politicizing factor is and was the de-politicization of 9/11. Many narratives of Hurricane Katrina, therefore, are loaded with an aggregation of dissent and political discourse that relates not just to Katrina but also to 9/11 and the War on Terror. This article focuses specifically on Dave Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina, Zeitoun (2009) and the way it responds to the domestication of 9/11 in these early instances of 9/11 fiction, and, in particular Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). It argues that Zeitoun responds to The Road’s conservative, messianic allegory, its retrograde formulation of frontier masculinity and unlikely recourse to the domestic. Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina is also a migrant story and it is able to both dramatize the social realities of the War on Terror and build a surprising and affecting narrative of community and pluralism in the wake of disaster. Ultimately, this comparative analysis illuminates a wider and revealing departure from the cultural representation of 9/11 in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina where texts like Zeitoun, are overtly political and loaded with the weight of two catastrophes.     

Violence and trauma: predicting the impact on the well-being of African American women with severe mental illness

Exposure to violence and trauma has become a major mental health and public health problem in the United States. This study assesses the rates of exposure to traumatic events of 55 adult African American women receiving treatment in an urban community mental health clinic. The study examined three research questions. First, what is the rate of exposure to violence and trauma among African American women in an urban community mental health clinic? Second, what effect does violence and trauma exposure have on mental health? Finally, does exposure to violence and trauma have an effect on well-being as measured with the Medical Outcomes Survey (MOS/SF-36)? A significant negative relationship between diagnostic burden and well-being was found. A negative nonsignificant relationship was found between Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS) and wellbeing. Study findings suggest that use of a screening and assessment tool for violence and trauma exposure may have important clinical implications in providing appropriate mental health services to African American women.     

Planning to Plan: A Process to Involve Child Welfare Agencies in Disaster Preparedness Planning

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when child welfare officials in Louisiana reported they did not know the whereabouts of all their children in foster care, disaster planning in public child welfare became a new area of concern. This article reports on a process of engaging seven public child welfare agencies in planning for disasters that could affect child safety and service delivery. The Washington Metropolitan Area Disaster Planning Project used a strengths-based approach to help agencies responsible for protecting and serving children in foster care and families at risk of abuse and neglect develop plans to augment and continue service delivery and responsiveness in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster. The processes of gathering information on disaster responsiveness, interviewing community and professional informants, developing a template to guide disaster planning within the agencies, and implementing a tabletop exercise are described. As a result of this consultation effort agencies became aware that disaster planning at the state and county levels had proceeded without child welfare at the table, that the increase in need for child welfare services during a disaster was not recognized by disaster professionals, and that practicing disaster responsiveness is necessary to assure readiness.     

Reflections on Hurricane Katrina by Older Adults

Abstract

This article presents three case studies of older adults who survived Hurricane Katrina. Their narratives are used to illustrate risk and resilience theory as well as principles of survivorship. Implications for social work practice are provided.