EAGER: SAI: A Study of Mitigation Decisions for America's Coastal Residential Infrastructure

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

This study examines the perspectives and decisions of homeowners who reside in coastal communities that are subject to extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. Residents have opportunities to strengthen their homes against the risk of hurricanes, and the decisions to make these investments depend in part on their assessments of the risks and possible consequences.

To make informed decisions, homeowners need to know not only the risks of extreme weather, but also how different types of homes and building materials are impacted by extreme weather. In order to assess the cognitive basis for these decisions, the researchers aim to assess perspectives and experiences via a diverse, representative survey of homeowners in a coastal region that includes residents who have been directly impacted by hurricanes.

This study supports the development of sustainable residential infrastructure in regions that are subject to extreme weather. The study also provides opportunities for the training of graduate students in the methods of scientific data collection and analysis.

By drawing on interdisciplinary methods and data archives, this project develops a new methodological framework that identifies features of homes in the study region, the damage they sustained in a hurricane, and the inferred characteristics of residential households. Equipped with these data, which allow for robust sampling methods, the researchers aim to administer a standardized survey with modules suitable for testing site-specific and event-specific hypotheses regarding homeowner decision processes following a major hurricane.

These sampling and survey data enable researchers to efficiently deploy this methodology following major hurricanes across different coastal communities. The responses of survey participants allow the researchers to examine multiple research questions. For instance, do homeowners perceive the risk of catastrophic loss, or have building codes unintentionally fostered a false sense of security?

How do experiences of direct losses versus indirect impacts influence risk perceptions and voluntary uptake of enhanced construction standards among homeowners? How do household economic and social dynamics influence the decision to reduce hurricane risks through enhanced construction standards? The answers to these questions can help local stakeholders to craft policies that incentivize homeowners to strengthen residential infrastructure in areas that are subject to natural disasters.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.