3. Study area and methods The study was conducted in South Charduani and Tafalbaria villages of Charduani Union (the smallest rural administrative and local government unit) Patharghata Upazila (sub-district) of Barguna district during February and July 2013. The villages are situated on the southern coast of Bangladesh, on the banks of the Baleshwar River, a channel of the Bay of Bengal. This area is frequently and severely affected by various common disasters like cyclone, storm surge, coastal floods and erosion, and salinity intrusion. The study area was one of the four worst Sidr-affected districts, and it has a high cyclone risk: the majority of previous cyclone tracks crossed this district, and six major cyclones hit this area (and our study villages in particular) in the seven years from 2007 to 2013.1 The particular villages were chosen because they were two of the most severely affected by Cyclone Sidr: Cyclone Sidr caused 344 deaths, which was 4% of the total population of the villages, and about 90% of houses were damaged [52]. The impacts of Sidr make these two villages excellent choices with which to explore the experience of severely affected communities, and this in turn makes them a good choice to inform development of robust cyclone disaster management policy for the Bangladeshi coast.
Households are the primary units of analysis in this study, because households are tightly knit in coastal Bangladesh, and act together in disaster recovery. To understand households′ experience we randomly selected households, and interviewed their household heads 2, asking both qualitative and quantitative questions. Because we interviewed them in their homes, on most occasions other household members were part of the conversation and contributed additional insights. In these communities, usual practise is for household heads to be the primary spokesperson on a family’s behalf, as they have a good sense of household’s vulnerability to cyclones. This has obvious limitations (e.g. in the insight it offers into women’s experience), however it is an appropriate, pragmatic method to investigate more general characteristics of households′ recovery, and commonly used in research in these regions. The number of households interviewed was a trade-off between precision and effort. Our target was 155 households overall—sufficient to give a precision of plus or minus 7%, with 93% confidence [56], given that there were 1990 households in the two study villages; our approach was similar to that. We set targets for each village based on the number of households in each, and within each village selected households randomly. We interviewed 159 household heads, using a structured questionnaire, and obtained valid responses from 156 (74 from South Charduani, and 82 from Tafalbaria). When we interviewed household heads, we also observed the physical settings and the everyday lives of villagers, and that contributed to our understanding. The interviews with households were complimented by a variety of qualitative investigations, to provide additional perspectives on, and more detail about, resilience and recovery. Qualitative methods are particularly helpful in identifying local perspectives on disaster resilience and recovery. They create a lens through which we can look at social norms, trust, mutual cooperation, people’s emotions, needs, and other culturally and socially embedded resources that are used by households for post-disaster recovery.
To extend the investigation of village experience, four in-depth case studies were conducted to understand the individuals′ experiences in recovering from the damage and loss. In addition, eight Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with villagers were conducted to further explore how villagers perceived impacts and threats of cyclones, the socioeconomic challenges of recovery from Sidr, and how they used social networks in recovery. The perspectives of local leaders were canvassed through thirty-seven Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) and through meetings with local journalists, local government officials, and a day-long NGO workshop. The perspectives of disaster experts at the national level were explored through interviews with five policy makers (senior government employees—Policy Maker Interviews (PMIs)), and with 14 Disaster Practitioners (national and international NGO employees—Disaster Practitioner Interviews (DPIs)). Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis provides both insight into personal experience, and a capacity to generalise about the villages. Combining villagers′, local leaders′ and experts′ views provides a corrective on the perspectives of each group (i.e. it supports triangulation on key features of village experience). Combining national, regional and local experience enables issues at each scale to be considered in relation to other scales. The quantitative data were analysed with SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences), and descriptive statistics —frequency distributions, percentages, tables, and graphs. Qualitative data were analysed by coding meeting notes with initial concepts, and categorising data by key themes, and finally analysing the interview, focus groups, and meeting notes related to each theme to draw out key findings.