Reflective Scholarship: Evaluation of University-Community Partnerships during a Post-Deepwater Horizon Resilience Study in Louisiana and Alabama

Background and Purpose: In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, emergency workers, journalists and academic researchers arrived in the Gulf region to assess the impacts of hydrocarbon disaster on human and nonhuman communities. This project, part of the Gulf Of Mexico Research Initiative-funded Consortium for Resilient Gulf Communities (CRGC), partnered researchers from Tulane University with three community-led organizations to survey 326 residents of Plaquemines and Lafourche Parishes in Louisiana and lower Mobile County, Alabama. Individual surveys sought to determine the continuing effects of this hydrocarbon disaster on individual psychosocial resilience, social networks, and disaster preparedness throughout the region. The research would not have been possible without the willingness of community partners to affiliate with Tulane as research assistants and project hosts.

This presentation reports on the results of two evaluations with the project research team and community stakeholders. The evaluation assessed community engagement approaches to address the questions: In conducting research following the worst technological disaster in U.S. history, what makes a partnership valid? What can other researchers and practitioners who work in post-disaster contexts learn from our case study, our self-reflection, and our self-critique? Our research reflects the ways in which data collection may position researchers to reinforce in-group and out-group separations between universities and community-led organizations during disaster recovery research.

Methods: In spring and summer 2018, the CRGC team conducted internal qualitative interviews and interviews with community partners to establish how disaster researchers might use data collection as a means of strengthening connections between community-led organizations and universities. Interviews were conducted with two groups: a) key partners at stakeholder organizations (i.e. those who donated office space for the biggest round of survey data collection) before and after the results of the survey were released and b) members of the Consortium’s research team.

This study provides a key component of a future mixed-methods publication about the research practices of the CRGC, complementing the quantitative results that dominate the 2017 study. Using feminist methodologies of reflective practice to conduct interviews, we entered qualitative data collected from from researcher memos and roughly 20 hours of field interviews into Atlas TI, using both in vivo and axial coding to establish key themes about community research practices that emerge from both sides of the partnership MOUs. Our coding methods stem from Charmaz (2007), Miles and Huberman (1994) and Lesen (2015).

Results: Because surveys were conducted in three communities, two states and two languages (Vietnamese and English), our initial findings suggest that CRGC findings were received differently in different communities. This variation corresponds to average psychosocial resilience scores among participants and the average income within each region. Our results indicate that communication between researchers and community members remain key.

Conclusions and Implications:

This study holds timely implications researchers conducting disaster-related work in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, where residents continue to recover from the 2017 hurricane season.  We offer a timeline-based methodology outlining how interdisciplinary teams might work with community partners before and after findings are published.