Predicting sense of community in a population displaced by Hurricane Katrina

Sense of community is a feeling of social cohesion and an emotional connection with a larger group of people. Currently there is disagreement whether these feelings are driven by internal individual characteristics or external factors in the community. In a population displaced by natural disaster, individuals are forced to try reestablishing a sense of community either in a new location all together or within their original, but distinctly different, post-disaster neighborhood. Three years after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast Child and Family Health study, a longitudinal cohort of 1,079 randomly selected households heavily impacted by the storm, investigated the factors that influence an individual's sense of community. Multiple statistical approaches, including mixed Rasch modeling and multivariate linear regression, were used to compare scores from the Sense of Community scale across various demographic groups, household characteristics, housing stability, and mental health outcomes to determine the factors best predicting sense of community in a displaced population. The results indicate that despite the complex associations of individual, household and community factors, it is primarily housing stability and perceived safety that determine one's sense of community. This suggests that community-level efforts to improve safety and state or federal policies assisting displaced households in finding stable, permanent housing should promote the sense of social cohesion.