Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

139 The study employed both qualitative and quantitative research approaches to conceptualize household resilience to floods. The three key qualitative data collection approaches for this study included in-depth interviews with key informants, focus group discussions (FGDs), and field observations. Four FGDs and some 10 in-depth interviews were carried out in each commune, each covering a range of social classes and gender. Information from the qualitative research was used for designing the structured questionnaires for the household survey in August 2010. Table 1. Socioeconomic conditions and livelihood activities in the three study sites The study used a multiple items approach using both Likert scales and a dichotomous response to design questionnaires for measuring household resilience. As noted by de Vaus (2002) it is beneficial to use multiple indicators to measure the complexity of a concept. Multiple items also help to increase reliability and precision of the measure. The multiple item approach using Likert scales was widely accepted in measuring individual resilience to stresses in psychological disciplines (Wagnild and Young 1993, Connor and Davidson 2003, Yu and Zhang 2007, Baek et al. 2010, Wang et al. 2010), and individual resilience to institutional changes (Marshall and Marshall 2007). As rural households in the MRD have experienced the impacts of annual flood events for years, we argue that using a “subjective well-being approach” helps to identify the ability of households to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods. Ten statements that reflect subjective well-being of rural households were developed to construct households’ resilience to floods in the MRD. As reviewed in the introduction section, resilience is referred as the capacity of a system to cope with and recover from an external shock or stress. Some people may argue that flood events in the MRD are not external shocks because people have experienced the floods every year. However, we argue that large flood events such as the historic flood in 2000 can be seen as “external shocks” because they exceed the coping capacity of many people. Some people could cope well with the event, but many people were vulnerable to that flood. Therefore, the statements used in this approach to measure households’ resilience to floods are related to their coping capacities in the 2000 flood event. The statements related to confidence in securing food, income, and health of family members during historic flood events (the 2000 flood), and safe evacuation in future extreme flood events due to climate change or rising sea levels, and recovery after the flood if they are affected; confidence in securing homes in a large flood event such as the 2000 historic flood, and their interest in learning and implementing new ways of living with floods (flood-based livelihoods). In this analysis, most of the items are more likely to focus on experiences or perceptions of households in coping with floods in the past rather than the capacity to cope with future flood events in the context of local climate change scenarios. Therefore, further studies should be carried out to incorporate possible changes in the flood regimes into measures of resilience. The respondents, who represent their households, were asked to rate their agreement with 10 statements. The responses on the first nine items were provided using a five-point Likert scale, while a dichotomous response was applied for the last item (Table 2). The response rate was 100%. The stratified sampling approach was used to divide the total population of the delta into sub-populations of “three communes”, based on the existing socioeconomic and natural flood characteristics of the delta. The samples were chosen on the basis of social groups: poor, medium-income and better-off households. This approach has been widely used in rural development and natural hazard studies in developing countries (Smith et al. 2001, Tran et al. 2008). Within each stratum, five hamlets were randomly chosen and 30 households were randomly selected from the wealth ranking of households in each hamlet. In the case of Phu Duc commune, 50 samples were collected as there are only three hamlets in this commune. The total sample size in each case study was 150. The exception was Thanh My Tay commune, for which there were 159 samples. The average age of respondents was 52 years old. The proportion of male respondents was higher than that of female respondents. This may cause biases in terms of differences in perceptions between males and females toward floods. The education level of respondents and their family members was generally low. The average household size was 4.7. The gender ratio of households was