STAR:
Study of the Tsunami Aftermath
and Recovery in
On Major efforts of relief and
rebuilding are underway in the affected countries, but recovery is expected to
take years and little is known about what programs are likely to be effective
once initial needs for medical care, food, clothing, and shelter are met.
By systematically collecting information on
the full range of costs to individuals, families, and communities, and on the
ways in which they reconstruct their lives and livelihoods in the aftermath of
the disaster, we will provide important insights into the nature of programs
that will be effective in the medium-term in Sumatra
and in responses to future large-scale disasters.
We are conducting a study in
Indonesia
with funding from the World Bank, the National
Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the
MacArthur Foundation, which is designed to speak to these
issues.
Goals We have three main
goals. First, using longitudinal survey
data collected before and after the disaster, we will document the immediate
and medium term consequences of the disaster for mortality, family disruption
and relocation, and physical and mental health.
Second, we will trace the reconstruction of lives and livelihoods in the
aftermath of the disaster, paying particular attention to the roles of kinship
and social networks, community strength, and receipt and leveraging of external
aid. Third, we will identify the
characteristics of individuals, households and communities that are associated
with resilience to the deleterious consequences of the disaster. Approach Our project builds on a
large-scale nationally representative socio-economic survey, SUSENAS,
that is collected annually by
Statistics Indonesia (BPS).
Each year a new cross-section of respondents
is selected to be representative at the district level.
With the permission of BPS we are
recontacting respondents first interviewed in February,
2004 in the affected districts of Aceh and
North Sumatra.
Because we
are interviewing respondents who, at the time of the tsunami, resided at
varying distances from the beachfront and at various altitudes, our interviews
will capture experiences ranging from physical devastation and loss of life, to
far more muted effects of infrastructure damage and price changes, to very few
effects for those living further inland and further south.
This variation is important as it will allow
us to compare change over time for those who bore the brunt of the tsunami's
impact, to change over time for individuals considerably further from harm's
way.
The impact of the tsunami
will be measured by re-interviewing SUSENAS respondents who were living in
areas that were damaged (and in some areas that were not) and collecting the
same information on the health, socio-demographic and economic status of each
individual that was collected in 2004.
The 2004 SUSENAS is an excellent baseline for this project for two
reasons.
First, because sample sizes
in each year are large, the data from 2004 consist of interviews with over
11,000 households and over 45,000 people.
All of these respondents are being tracked in follow-up surveys in 2005-2007,
including those who have moved away from the study site.
Special efforts will be made to identify
people who have died and to follow orphans and older adults who might have
moved to live with other family.
Second, the 2004 SUSENAS
questionnaire was extremely detailed. In
this wave information on morbidities and use of health care of each household
member, along with detailed information on household economic resources, was
collected from all households. In
addition, one-quarter of households were administered an additional instrument
which collected information on general health status, psycho-social health,
injuries and symptoms associated with various diseases. At the household level, additional detail
about spending on health was gathered along with extensive information on the
quality, location and ownership of housing and land, the quality of the
environment, including the availability and quality of water. We are repeating the SUSENAS questions and
adding additional questions given the subsequent disaster. In addition to reinterviewing the SUSENAS households, we are conducting
detailed interviews with community informants, including the village leader, in
each of the survey communities, and with providers of health care and other
forms of aid. These interviews will
provide information on the availability of assistance from local community
organizations and from national and international entities, and on the degree
of physical destruction in the community.
The tsunami’s impact and factors
that protected from it Mortality serves as the most
basic indicator of the tsunami’s effects.
We will construct age-, gender-, and location-specific rates of death,
comparing areas more and less affected by the tsunami. We will also provide estimates of, among
other things, the number of orphans and their age, composition, their location
and living arrangements as well as the number of older people who are left
without family support in their later years.
Similar descriptions will be
provided for a number of indicators of well-being. At the individual level, this includes the
incidence of physical injuries, a battery of indicators of psycho-social health
problems, morbidities, symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression,
and anxiety, and more general health difficulties. The extent to which people relocated – and
where they relocated, with whom they lived and if and when they returned to
their pre-tsunami location will be measured.
We will consider the extent to which family – or extended family— are
able to buffer the impact of the tsunami by determining, for example, with whom
orphans are living. Economic and social
disruption will be measured by identifying loss of family and community resources,
loss of jobs and businesses, changes in income.
Changes in real levels of household expenditures provide a very good
indicator of immediate changes in the well-being of all household members,
whereas changes in levels of wealth are indicative of longer-run effects of the
tsunami. Loss of housing and land, as
well as infrastructure at the community level will be described. Community level damage will
be summarized drawing on two sources of data.
First, using satellite images of the coastline, available from NASA, in
conjunction with GPS-based location information which we will collect for each
village in the survey, it will be possible to measure the extent of physical
destruction and the pace of recovery. We
will quantify the land area in each village that was inundated with water and obtain
estimates of vegetation damage. The
satellite images below illustrate this approach. The lefthand image
shows one area of Satellite Images of
coast of Additionally, we are
collecting detailed information at the community level on the extent of
infrastructure damage and on the availability and cost of various services,
both immediately after the tsunami and at the time of the interview. We also obtain information about changes in
land use from local village leaders. In
addition to this information on destruction and rebuilding within the
community, we ask about receipt of aid and assistance within and from outside
the community, as well as the emergence or reappearance of local community
welfare institutions. These data allow
us to relate the pace of post-tsunami recovery to the availability of aid,
controlling for the magnitude of the tsunami’s effects as indicated by the
satellite-derived measures of changes in vegetation and land use. Project Team The project team includes three
U.S.-based researchers, Elizabeth Frankenberg, Jed Friedman, and Duncan Thomas,
and three Indonesian researchers, Bondan Sikoki, Wayan Suriastini,
and Cecep Sumantri. Frankenberg, a demographer and sociologist,
and Thomas, an economist, are based at the 