Most of the research so far conducted on collective efficacy has studied groups in business, educational, or sports settings. Collective efficacy, not unlike the everyday notion of team spirit, has, for example, been found to enhance the performance of teams playing volleyball or hockey. Recently, however, a start has been made on applying the concept to events that follow natural disasters. Benight (2004) has published information about the aftermath of an extensive series of forest fires and flash flooding between May and July in Colorado, USA. Widespread damage was caused, several homes were destroyed, and two people died. Benight obtained data from a sample of 50 residents about a month after the flooding and again one year later. Equivalent information was gathered from a control sample at the one year point. On both occasions measures of the loss of resources as a result of the disasters, the degree of social support received from others, and the amount of distress were used. A measure of collective efficacy was used only at the later assessment; Benight himself acknowledges that this imposes limits on the inferences that can be drawn from his data.
Benight C C (2004), Collective efficacy following a series of natural disasters, Anxiety, Stress and Coping, 17, 401-420.
One question that Benight has begun to answer is the extent to which factors soon after a disaster may affect later collective efficacy. He found that collective efficacy was higher among people who reported relatively low loss of resources as a result of the disasters and among those who experienced greater social support. He predicted that higher collective efficacy would be found among people who suffered lower levels of distress, but in fact he found a low, but significant, correlation in the opposite direction. In other words, his data suggested that people who experienced greater distress were more likely to report high levels of collective efficacy a year later.
Analysing the data obtained at the second assessment Benight found evidence of the "buffering" effect of social support and collective efficacy (hereafter abbreviated to CE). Among people who had suffered a high level of loss of resources those who reported higher social support and greater CE were less likely to still be suffering high levels of distress. It appeared that higher CE one was one of the factors that enable them to cope with their losses.
Another prediction that was not confirmed was that CE would be lower among the main sample, i.e. those people who had been through the disasters, than within the control group. Benight assumed that on the whole the trauma they had suffered would damage their CE. In fact they tended to report somewhat higher CE. As the two groups were evidently not formed through a process of random allocation not much can be read into this finding. However, it may be the case that the effect of trauma on CE will vary, possibly depending upon how well the community believes that the major incidents have been dealt with.
Among the communities described in this website the level of communal factors such as collective efficacy would have had a major influence on the way disasters, setbacks, and unwelcome uses of power would have been handled, and upon the outcome when the final abandonment took place. In a community such as St Kilda we can see evidence of a weakening of confidence in the local society during the decades before evacuation. In others there are historical indications that the community itself was less than fully integrated. In Dunwich, for example, after the storms of 1286 that demolished further large sections of the town the mayor and bailiffs changed at both of the next two annual elections, reflecting dissatisfaction with the town's leadership, and a commission had to be set up to investigate a large scale conspiracy.
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