TY  - JOUR
A1  - Erfurth, Luise M.
A1  - Hernandez Bark, Alina S.
A1  - Molenaar, Carin
A1  - Aydin, Anna Lisa
A1  - Dick, Rolf van
T1  - "If worse comes to worst, my neighbors come first": social identity as a collective resilience factor in areas threatened by sea floods
T2  - SN social sciences
N2  - Research on collective resilience processes still lacks a detailed understanding of psychological mechanisms at work when groups cope with adverse conditions, i.e., long-term processes, and how such mechanisms affect physical and mental well-being. As collective resilience will play a crucial part in facing looming climate change-related events such as floods, it is important to investigate these processes further. To this end, this study takes a novel holistic approach by combining resilience research, social psychology, and an archeological perspective to investigate the role of social identity as a collective resilience factor in the past and present. We hypothesize that social identification buffers against the negative effects of environmental threats in participants, which increases somatic symptoms related to stress, in a North Sea region historically prone to floods. A cross-sectional study (N = 182) was conducted to analyze the moderating effects of social identification on the relations between perceived threat of North Sea floods and both well-being and life satisfaction. The results support our hypothesis that social identification attenuates the relationship between threat perception and well-being, such that the relation is weaker for more strongly identified individuals. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find this buffering effect to be present for life satisfaction. Future resilience studies should further explore social identity as a resilience factor and how it operates in reducing environmental stress put on individuals and groups. Further, to help communities living in flood-prone areas better cope with future environmental stress, we recommend implementing interventions strengthening their social identities and hence collective resilience.
KW  - Archeology
KW  - Social identity
KW  - Collective resilience factor
KW  - Floods
KW  - Climate change
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/69576
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-695765
SN  - 2662-9283
N1  - Data Availability
The dataset and questionnaires generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the OSF repository (https://osf.io/vu47y/).
N1  - Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work was funded by the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (Grant Number K83/2017). The grant was awarded to the Leibniz Collaborative Excellence project ‘Resilience factors in a diachronic and intercultural perspective’.
VL  - 1
IS  - 11, art. 272
SP  - 1
EP  - 24
PB  - Springer Nature Switzerland AG
CY  - Cham
ER  -