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Handbook of Disaster Research pp 243–262Cite as

Children and Disasters

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Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

Although researchers have studied children’s reactions to disaster since the 1940s, this subfield has expanded tremendously over the past decade. In fact, nearly half of all studies on children and disaster have been published since 2010, and most of this recent scholarship has focused on a limited number of large-scale catastrophic events. This chapter highlights six major waves of research on children and disaster, including contributions to our understanding of (1) the effects of disaster on children’s mental health and behavioral reactions; (2) disaster exposure as it relates to physical health and well-being; (3) social vulnerability and sociodemographic characteristics; (4) the role of institutions and socio-ecological context in shaping children’s pre- and post-disaster outcomes; (5) resiliency, strengths, and capacities; and (6) children’s voices, perspectives, and actions across the disaster lifecycle. Throughout, the chapter emphasizes advances in methods, theory, policy, and practice. It concludes with recommendations for future research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Fothergill and Peek (2015, Appendix A) for a discussion of the definitional complexity surrounding the terms children and youth in disaster studies.

  2. 2.

    The following factors informed our final decision to focus on “children” rather than “children and youth” in our literature search and review. First, our initial searches using the terms *children and disaster* and *children and youth and disaster* returned many duplicate results. This is because many of the studies with *children and disaster* as keywords also included *youth* as a keyword. Second, the diverse use of the term *youth* limited its utility as a search term in this review (see www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/youth/fact-sheets/youth-definition.pdf). Third, the sheer volume of results returned for *children and disaster* combined with the timeframe available to review the studies made it unfeasible to conduct a second systematic review of additional publications of youth and disaster.

  3. 3.

    Page limitations prohibit a full accounting of the literature inventory, although it informed every aspect of this chapter.

  4. 4.

    The dramatic rise in the number of publications on children and disaster may reflect broader trends related to publishing, including the increase in the number of journals focusing on disasters as well as those dedicated to child and youth studies. The increase may also be due to the number of catastrophic events that have affected large numbers of children over the past several years, and the body of the research that has been generated in turn. Regardless of what is driving the increase, there has been a clear and sharp upward trend in the number of child-specific disaster publications.

  5. 5.

    We think this increase is due, at least in part, to Anderson’s (2005) appeal for more sociological disaster research on children as well as to the publication of the 2008 special issue on children and disasters, which appeared in the journal Children, Youth and Environments. Both Anderson’s seminal article where he asked “Where are all the children and youths in social science disaster research?” (p. 161) and the special issue used a social vulnerability framework and encouraged researchers to look beyond the mental and physical health effects of disaster to expand the subfield in more sociological directions.

  6. 6.

    Some of the most widely cited reviews and empirical studies of children, resilience, and disasters include: Caffo and Belaise (2003), Cryder, Kilmer, Tedeschi, and Calhoun (2006), Masten (2015), Masten and Narayan (2012), Masten and Obradovic (2008), Masten and Osofsky (2010), and Zolkoski and Bullock (2012).

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Acknowledgements

Erin Prapas, Elizabeth Ochoa, Kellie Alexander, Sonja Lara, Hunter Stafford, and Mariah Taylor—all students at Colorado State University—provided extensive and able assistance with compiling and summarizing the literature that was reviewed for this chapter. We also wish to thank the editors of the Handbook for their careful and thorough review of our work at various stages in the writing process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

    Lori Peek & Jennifer Tobin

  2. New York University, New York City, USA

    David M. Abramson

  3. Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada

    Robin S. Cox

  4. University of Vermont, Burlington, USA

    Alice Fothergill

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  1. Lori Peek
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  4. Alice Fothergill
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  5. Jennifer Tobin
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Correspondence to Lori Peek .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, New York, USA

    Havidán Rodríguez

  2. University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, Texas, USA

    William Donner

  3. Core Faculty, Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA

    Joseph E. Trainor

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Peek, L., Abramson, D.M., Cox, R.S., Fothergill, A., Tobin, J. (2018). Children and Disasters. In: Rodríguez, H., Donner, W., Trainor, J. (eds) Handbook of Disaster Research. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63254-4_13

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