Social Network Model for Accessing and Sharing Expertise During Disasters

Abstract

Whether human-made or natural disasters, both could typically followed by chaos, this often results from an inadequate overall response. Preparedness is the best response to emergencies, and a multi-agent-based approach to coordination decision support systems often plays a significant role in disaster management and response. Using an integrated approach to facilitate coordination is considered important in dealing with disasters. Often, there are different kinds of coordination, such as physical coordination between emergent agencies or local agencies, and administrative coordination. While traditional disaster management studies have focused on coordination of managerial or government policy approaches, this study focuses on the direct local-based advice network used by emergency personnel (such as managers and volunteers) to understand how the properties of such human networks affect the ability to access and share expertise during a disaster incident in order to ensure prompt and accurate decisions. The key motivating question guiding this research is: how can the multi-level study of properties of social networks at network, actor and tie level help us understand the coordination that enables expertise access and sharing during disasters? Moreover, this study also asks: To what degree is this relationship associated with expertise coordination in a negative or positive manner? How are centralisation and efficiency in an individual’s social network associated with coordination? Do network constraints and tie strength in an individual’s social network negatively or positively affect coordination? This study uses novel theoretical approaches to suggest an empirical-based framework and methodology for exploring the relationship between the properties of social networks and coordination of expertise during disasters.