Incorporating Youth Perspectives into Disaster Planning: Piloting Drone-Based Photovoice to Map Community Assets

Abstract

Place attachment, the emotional bond to one’s environment, may help mediate long-term psychosocial outcomes among youth experiencing environmental disruptions. Community assets can contribute to or inhibit place attachment; understanding the community assets important to youth may help inform planning priorities around these assets, especially in a disaster planning context. This study pilots a novel drone-based photovoice methodology (DBP) to explore youth perceptions of the community assets that build their connections to place in a hazard-exposed coastal community. After documenting 22 community assets and discussing a smaller subset in a focus group setting, thematic analysis of the focus group transcript revealed that youth participants valued community assets for their economic, cultural, and social cohesion functions. Furthermore, they assigned importance to assets that contributed to their self-development and sense of autonomy. Findings also suggest that DBP was effective at revealing spatial relationships, capturing the full scale of assets, providing additional details about the site, and providing a reference for change over time, which suggests that a similar methodology may be useful in future community asset mapping projects. This study recommends that local planners leverage youth perspectives to identify new important assets, explore additional dimensions of those already deemed important, align youth perspectives with hazard planning to produce co-benefits, and use DBP outputs for whole-community engagement. Participation in the DBP process also may build community capacity that planners could utilize for future disaster preparedness activities.