An Approach for Guiding the Development and Assessing the Interdisciplinarity of New Methodologies for Community...

There are critical and preventable inequalities in disaster impacts and postdisaster recovery. To formulate solutions for minimizing or preventing these unequal impacts, there is a great need for interdisciplinary methodologies that use social factors to set project scopes and drive engineering analyses and designs. At present time, however, limited guidance exists on how to develop and execute interdisciplinary methodologies, especially related to the study of community disaster resilience. This article offers an approach for developing and assessing interdisciplinary research methodologies. The framework incorporates insights from social science into structural engineering for integrated research focused on community disaster resilience. The two examples offered in the article assess the interdisciplinarity of two loss estimation methodologies. The goal of this perspectives article is to facilitate future interdisciplinary community disaster resilience research given its potential for transformative outcomes in terms of encouraging decision making that is driven by the needs of those who are often overlooked in disaster mitigation and recovery policies.