Collective Psychosocial Resilience as a Group Process Following Flooding: How It Arises and How Groups Can Sustain It

Ntontis, Evangelos and Zhang, Meng Logan (2024). Collective Psychosocial Resilience as a Group Process Following Flooding: How It Arises and How Groups Can Sustain It. In: Williams, Richard; Kemp, Verity; Porter, Keith; Healing, Tim and Drury, John eds. Major Incidents, Pandemics and Mental Health: The Psychosocial Aspects of Health Emergencies, Incidents, Disasters and Disease Outbreaks. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 160–165.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019330.025

Abstract

Flooding can severely affect wellbeing through both primary stressors and secondary stressors. The impacts may be mitigated by community resilience; this may be used deliberately or unwittingly by people affected and the responsible authorities. Using data from England and Ireland, we address collective psychosocial resilience – that is, the way in which shared social identification allows groups to spontaneously emerge and mobilise solidarity and social support. First, we show that shared social identity can emerge during floods due to experiencing a common fate, and this leads to communities mobilising social support. Second, we show that emergent shared social identity can decline due to a lack of perceived common fate, the disappearance of collective identity, or inequalities experienced after the disaster. However, social identity can be sustained by communities providing social support, by persisting secondary stressors, or intentionally by holding commemorations. Additionally, shared social identity is associated with observed unity.

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