Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Purpose: Natural disaster could happen to everyone. However, vulnerable people result in poorer recovery. People in poverty, women, the disabled, and the aged are often identified as disaster-vulnerable people due to lack of resources and power. Vulnerable people became even more vulnerable after disaster given that they have less resource to reconstruct their lives. Natural disaster is a gendered terrain because people's experiences and needs in the disaster preparedness, evacuation, relief and reconstruction stages are varied across genders (Enarson & Morrow, 1998). Nowadays, little is known about Asian female survivors' experience. A tragic earthquake, which was 7.2 on the scale, happened on Sept. 21, 1999 in Taiwan. Many survivors had become homeless and settled in refuges. By 2004, all survivors left refuges and started new lives. This study was conducted when survivors had already left refuges and reconstructed their lives. It aims to explore the reconstruction experience of female survivors in one Asian culture (Taiwan).

Research methods: A grounded theory approach was adopted. In-depth interviews were employed with 20 Taiwanese female earthquake survivors, aged 30 to 55. Open sampling, variational sampling, discriminate sampling along with open coding, axial coding, and selective coding were employed to collect and analyze data. Peer-debriefing and member checking served the purpose of validating research findings.

Research Results: The major finding of this study is that women's roles shifted dramatically in the reconstruction stage. Participants in this study indicated that what they had been through in the earthquake turned them into even loving carers and strong protectors of their family. Many working-class participants in this study become the breadwinners of their family during reconstruction stage. Numbers of working-class men could not return back to their jobs given that the places they had worked before crashed in the earthquake. In order to support and reconstruct their family, these working-class women take any jobs open to them. In contrast, their male partners suffer from long-term unemployment and become withdrawn due to their male prides. For example, their male partners see working as clean workers is a matter of face-losing. Therefore, they rather stay at home. Nevertheless, these working-class women help their male partners save faces and sacrifice themselves in doing more jobs to support family. In Taiwanese cultures, face-saving is more important for men than for women and women should help their male partners save face in public. Women are expected to be tender women but tough mothers and accept what is destined to them. These are female gender norms in Taiwanese culture and participants cope with the aftermath accordingly. This finding demonstrated that culturally specific gender role norms contributing to survivors' coping strategies and should be included in disaster work.

Implications: How can the interdisciplinary disaster service network be tailored to meet the needs of female disaster survivors are discussed. Gender-sensitive and culture-sensitive disaster works are also discussed.

Reference: Enarson, E., & Morrow, B. H. (1998) The gendered terrain of disaster through women's eyes. Westport: Praeger Publisher.