Community resilience to disaster risk in Sichuan province of China: an analysis of TOPSIS

Objective To analyze the level of community resilience to disaster risk and its relevant factors in various regions of Sichuan province of China.Methods Using stratified random sampling,we recruited 880 urban and rural adult community residents in two administrative regions of Sichuan province and conducted a survey on community resilience to disaster risk among the residents with a self-designed questionnaire in April 2015.We adopted the technique for order-preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and T test for independent-samples to compare the community resilience in different regions.Results The overall score was 3.15±0.19 for community resilience reported by the residents.The results of TOPSIS analysis revealed higher criterion index (Ci) value of community resilience of rural communities than those of urban and township communities (1 vs.0.282 and 0.084).Compared to urban and township residents,the rural residents showed significantly higher scores for the relationship between habitants and community (3.69±0.73 vs.3.20±0.87 and 3.11±0.92) and intimate relationship among community dwellers (3.58±0.79 vs.3.27±0.73 and 3.15±0.79) (P<0.05 for all).The ability of disaster management and information communication of rural communities were higher than those of urban and township communities (both P<0.05).Conclusion Disaster risk-related consciousness and involvement should be improved among community residents to increase community management and resilience to disaster risk.