Methodological recommendations for content validation of community resilience indicators

Published

February 25, 2025

Author(s)

Michael D. Gerst, Maria Dillard, Jarrod Loerzel

Abstract

Community resilience indicators have been increasingly used in disaster resilience planning and decision making. However, the methods used to validate that indicators measure what they claim to continue to be lacking. Part of the issue is that validation is a multi-dimensional concept, and there is limited guidance in the literature on which dimensions are most relevant to community resilience indicators. Consequently, most studies focus on tests that require little original data collection or simple statistical methods, such as whether indicators covary with disaster impacts, or on reliability—a related but different concept akin to measuring consistency. Guidance from fields that heavily utilize indicators, such as medicine and education, suggests that while these tests are necessary, they are not sufficient to properly validate indicators. Specifically, statistical validation methods should be paired with content validity methods, which establish that the selected indicators have appropriate theoretical and empirical underpinnings. Furthermore, content validity should draw from both the scientific literature and rigorous expert judgment protocols, as each type of evidence generation provides a check on the other. In a comprehensive review of the community resilience literature, this study shows that out of 43 relevant community resilience indicator studies, one-third included no expert judgment at all, and that only two studies followed a rigorous expert judgment protocol. Thus, a vast majority of community resilience indicator frameworks rely heavily on evidence generated from the literature without the balance of structured expert judgment. Given the relative lack of adoption of existing methods, this study presents a review of methods and provides recommendations based on the specific needs of developing community resilience indicators.

Citation

Natural Hazards Review

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

resilience, indicators, validation

Citation

Gerst, M. , Dillard, M. and Loerzel, J. (2025), Methodological recommendations for content validation of community resilience indicators, Natural Hazards Review, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956734 (Accessed May 15, 2025)