Reports

Unanticipated Consequences of a Pandemic Flu in New York City: A Neighborhood Focus Group Study

Fuller, Elizabeth J.; Abramson, David M.; Sury, Jonathan

There is fairly consistent evidence that ethnic and minority communities have historically been more vulnerable to disasters, less trusting of public authority, and often so socially marginalized that it placed them in harm’s way. In an effort to explore some of these issues we conducted a series of community-based focus groups among selected ethnic communities in order to understand how perceptions of neighborhood life during a pandemic -- and community adaptation -- might vary across the city. We conducted the focus groups in six distinct New York City neighborhoods, each meant to represent a particular ethnic sub-group: Jamaican- Americans in Wakefield, Bronx; Chinese-Americans in Chinatown; African-Americans in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; Dominican-Americans in Washington Heights; Greek-Americans in Astoria, Queens; and South Indian-Americans in Flushing, Queens. Four of the focus groups were conducted in English, one was in Spanish, and one was in Mandarin, Chinese.

Geographic Areas

Files

  • thumnail for NCDP_Research_Brief_2007-10.pdf NCDP_Research_Brief_2007-10.pdf application/pdf 139 KB Download File

More About This Work

Academic Units
National Center for Disaster Preparedness
Publisher
National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Series
NCDP Research Briefs, 2007-10
Published Here
September 26, 2012