Data Mining for Community Resilience: Understanding Stakeholder Value Systems across Communities in the State of Florida

Abstract

Achieving community resilience is a complex task, as there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that can be applied uniformly across all communities. Communities with unique characteristics (e.g., geographic, demographic, and social vulnerabilities) require tailored resilience strategies aligned with their stakeholders’ values and priorities. Stakeholder values refer to the things that are of importance, merit, and provide utilities to stakeholders, and stakeholders from different communities may hold values with varying degrees of importance, forming their own distinct value systems. Despite the abundance of research on stakeholder engagement in resilience planning, there remains a limited understanding of what stakeholders value or prioritize in resilience planning. To address this gap, our study examined stakeholder value systems and analyzed how the value systems vary across different communities (e.g., coastal versus inland; metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan; more versus less socially vulnerable). We used a semisupervised learning algorithm—Anchored correlation explanation (anchored CorEx)—to analyze the social media data from Twitter collected within the Florida communities. We found that: (1) physical built environment resilience values were ranked the highest, followed by environmental, social, and economic resilience values; (2) structural robustness and integrity, resource efficiency, comfort and health, and financial support were the highest-ranked values in the physical built environment, environmental, social, and economic resilience categories, respectively; (3) stakeholders from different communities had significant variations in their prioritizations of certain values (e.g., resource efficiency, beneficial land use); and (4) values such as structural robustness and integrity and resource efficiency require more attention in community resilience planning. The findings of this study could facilitate stakeholder-centered and community-specific resilience planning by tailoring resilience practices to the unique value systems held by community stakeholders. Recognizing the potential disasters that many communities face across the world, policymakers and practitioners must understand the unique perspectives, needs, or concerns of stakeholders in terms of resilience planning. This research observed significant variations in stakeholder value systems across communities with different characteristics, including coastal versus inland, metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan, and socially vulnerable versus less socially vulnerable areas. The findings of this study hold the potential to enhance the design and implementation of resilience initiatives by tailoring strategies to account for the specific needs of communities with different characteristics. Additionally, the study underscores the value of social media data, particularly data from platforms like Twitter. Leveraging this data source can provide a real-time and cost-effective way of gaining valuable insights into stakeholder perspectives on resilience, enabling more informed decision making and the alignment of strategies with the evolving needs and values of the community.