"I Can't Imagine It" By Susan E. Howell and Alicia N. Jencik

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, survey research, as most of us know it in the developed world, was impossible in New Orleans. The most common response we receive when describing conditions in the city and how our lives have changed is, “I can’t imagine it.” This reaction applies to nearly every aspect of life, as 80 percent of the land area of the city flooded, over half of the city’s population is still displaced, and most of the infrastructure Americans take for granted was severely damaged. Our purpose is to describe the problems of conducting some form of survey in this environment. They range from the conceptual to the mundane, but all are important to recognize when surveying a post-disaster population. Hopefully, we can inform others who might find themselves in a similar situation.

Our specific task at the University of New Orleans was to conduct a Citizen Recovery Survey in an attempt to measure a baseline condition of how people were coping with their new lives. Our goal was to measure what problems citizens found most pressing, their difficulties in everyday life, their mood, and their expectations of government. It quickly became apparent that every stage of the standard survey procedure was severely affected by the environment. Although we tried to maintain the professional standards with which we are all familiar, those standards had to be compromised in order to obtain meaningful data within the existing budget.

The most basic issue facing us was the unknown location and racial composition of the population. New Orleans was at less than one-half its former population, and no reliable statistics were available as to how many people lived where. The problem of location was easier to solve than the problem of characteristics. Most of the areas along the Mississippi River did not flood, so many of those people had already returned to their homes. Other areas were nearly completely abandoned, and others were mixed, depending on the severity of flooding. Obviously, we had to target the sample to the populated areas, but the question was where to draw the line between populated and unpopulated. In consultation with a demographer in the Office of the Mayor, we decided to target seven zip codes which he estimated were more than two-thirds populated. When we say “estimated,” we mean basically a guess, since even utility information was not yet available. The seven zip codes were along the Mississippi River, so it was a reasonable population, and the mayor’s office provided figures indicating that approximately 85 percent of the current city population lived in these seven zip codes.

Normally, we have a fairly precise estimate of important demographics, such as the percentage of African Americans. However, since most of these seven zip codes were still missing population, we had no such estimate. From the U.S. Census we knew that the pre-Katrina percentage black was 57 percent, but we also knew that blacks had been disproportionately displaced and unable to return. The post-Katrina population would have fewer blacks, but how many fewer was not known. This became an important issue after the data were collected, when decisions had to be made about weighting the results.

The most interesting conceptual issues involved what topics to cover in the questionnaire. For twenty years we had conducted Quality of Life surveys in Jefferson and Orleans parishes, but a quick look at those questionnaires made it obvious that many questions were either laughable or irrelevant (or both) in the current environment. Here are some examples of questions from the Quality of Life surveys that clearly had to be eliminated:

In addition, all questions about schools were irrelevant, since the vast majority of schools had not opened.

Although some of the former questionnaire was still relevant, we decided that a dramatic change in the environment required a parallel change in the survey instrument. Instead of rating various government services, most of which were nearly nonexistent at the time of interviewing, we focused on the problems citizens were having in daily life and the losses they had incurred in Katrina. How difficult had certain daily tasks become? What conditions were people living in? Were they living in temporary housing? How had they been affected economically—for example, had they lost income or jobs? How were they sleeping? What were the levels of worry and depression? How many had illnesses or conditions made worse by Katrina?

Several of the new questions would never have been asked of a population in the United States pre-Katrina, illustrating how New Orleans had become somewhat “third world.” Because both authors were living in New Orleans, we knew firsthand the difficulties of post-Katrina life. Examples of unusual questions were:

Respondents were also asked about the difficulty they were experiencing with:

Our purpose was to establish a baseline condition of people living in New Orleans and Jefferson. There was no doubt in our minds that people were suffering, and that everyday life was difficult. But, as social scientists, we wanted to put numbers to these phenomena, and from these numbers measure progress, or lack of progress, six months to a year later.

“I Can’t Imagine It”: Survey Research in Post-Katrina New Orleans