Co-authors: Dr. Kelsea Best (THE Ohio State University), Dr. Ben Rachunok (NCSU)
Our original idea was that this dataset could let us track population-level changes in housing and risk perception before and after disasters. In the end, the paper became more of an exploratory piece: instead of developing new metrics, we tested how useful this survey could be for resilience research.
- What did this research initially set out to find?
Originally, Kendrick and I wanted to evaluate how housing stock changes after major disasters. This idea had been floating around for a while, but we kept running into what I call “paralysis of plenty” where so many possible questions meant we kept stalling out. We were both super excited when Kelsea joined as a co-author to shift the focus into a broader, big-picture perspective. Instead of chasing a single takeaway, we stepped back and explored the value of the dataset itself.
- What’s something you learned (a fact or crazy figure) doing this work?
One of our biggest takeaways was around risk perception. For example, between 2017 and 2019, the number of people in Houston who said they perceived risk increased dramatically — about ten times higher than the change we saw in Phoenix. That’s almost certainly tied to the impact hurricanes.We also saw differences in how people compared their current homes to previous ones. Some thought their new homes were more at risk, others less. These perceptions varied by age, by whether people rented or owned, and was highest among people who self-reported as “illegally occuping” homes (i.e. squatters). Goes to show the power of census data, they can capture opinions of people only temporariliy in homes.
- What was one software package/tool you used in this project that you hadn’t used before?
I got really into an R package called cowplot, built by Claus Wilke. It’s amazing for aligning figures, adding annotations, and putting everything together without having to jump into Illustrator. Before this, I would export figures to PDFs, open them in Illustrator, and manually rearrange everything. Now I can just do it all in R. Huge time saver — thanks, Claus!
- What’s been your go-to procrastination activity when working on this paper?
There were many, because this paper was in the works for a long time. But the big one was learning piano. I bought one and started playing for the first time since I was a kid. Turns out Hot Cross Buns and Three Blind Mice are the same song and Pink Pony Club is really hard. It was a good break from staring at data.
- Where do you think you did most of this work (home, desk, coffee shops?)
Mostly in my office at NC State (I recently added a treadmill desk, which makes it easier to keep moving while writing.) The runner-up location is SUNdays in Wilmington, NC (which also happens to be where I wrote much of my dissertation and is across the street from where I took the “coming back but better” picture on this website’s homepage!) 