Natural Disaster-related Loss of Home: A Phenomenological Investigation

Abstract

This study utilized Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore loss of home as a result of natural disaster: Natural Disaster-related Loss of Home (NDLH). Four survivors were interviewed who experienced NDLH in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A heuristic lens was employed to examine the researcher’s own NDLH experience in the wake of Hurricane Ivan. A hermeneutic understanding of “home,” as not just a place but a place that signifies the internal and interrelated worlds of its inhabitants, surfaced in participants’ accounts of loss. Shattered assumptions of safety and challenged personal identity were brought to the fore within sociocultural-historical contexts exposing economic, social, and racial disparities in access to resources during and after catastrophic events. NDLH revealed itself as an experience that both situates and is situated in a mosaic of happenings which call into question the very nature of security, reckoning between human nature and Mother Nature, home as symbol of self, and larger questions about the world at large. Survivors’ descriptions told of NDLH as an event that continually impacts their lives and whose meaning continues to provoke reflection.