Operationalizing a concept: The systematic review of composite indicator building for measuring community disaster resilience

The measurement of community disaster resilience through the development of a comprehensive set of composite indicators is becoming increasingly commonplace. Despite this growing trend, there is neither an agreement upon a standard procedure nor a comprehensive assessment of existing measurement frameworks in the relevant literature. To tackle these challenges, this study (1) proposes an overarching eight-step procedure for composite indicator building and (2) develops a meta-level assessment framework to allow for a systematic review of existing disaster resilience measurement frameworks in application of composite indicator building. This meta-level framework was established on the basis of the proposed eight-step composite indicator building procedure and qualified with the introduction of 19 dimensions and 36 metrics for quality assessment. In order to select relevant disaster resilience measures for this analysis, the study applied a systematic survey to collect measures based on four inclusion criteria: community-based, multifaceted, quantitative, and operationalized. Accordingly, 17 resilience measurement frameworks were chosen for further analysis in this review. The results of the quality assessment demonstrated that, from the theoretical perspective, resilience assessments originate from either the socio-ecological or engineering fields and can be classified into two main types of resilience indices and tools. This differs from results of the methodological perspective, which indicate that resilience measures can be characterized as deductive or similar to hierarchical and inductive assessments.