The Role of Trust in Neighborhood Recovery: Examinations from New Orleans’ Recovery from Hurricane Katrina
This dissertation describes and helps delineate the circumstances under which different kinds of trust influenced neighborhood recovery in the Greater New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina. These analyses provide insights into the effects of neighborhood levels of social capital, organizational capacity, particularized racial trust and generalized trust on the mean level of household recovery in Orleans and St. Bernard Parish neighborhoods. Results suggest that neighborhood organizational capacity and several measures of neighborhood social capital had direct and positive effects on neighborhood recovery and that the effects of generalized trust on neighborhood recovery are not fixed and that neighborhood organizational capacity moderates the extent to which generalized trust influences neighborhood recovery. The interactional effects of organizational capacity and generalized trust reflect the compensatory nature of social resources. The interaction reveals that neighborhood organizational capacity matters less among neighborhoods with high generalized trust and matters more among neighborhoods with low generalized trust. In this way, high organizational capacity can compensate for low generalized trust in the process of neighborhood recovery. These findings suggest how cooperative relations and other potentially beneficial structures of social relations can be supported either through organizational capacity or through trust. Moreover, these findings suggest that of the two methods for achieving effective cooperation, organizational capacity may be relatively more advantageous than interpersonal trust for hurricane recovery outcomes.
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