Consumer Vulnerability as a Shared Experience: Tornado Recovery Process in Wright, Wyoming

Abstract

Natural disasters leave people vulnerable because of threats to health and safety and because of losses of lives, financial assets, and possessions valued for functional and symbolic purposes. This article explores vulnerability as a shared experience, examines how responses to individual and community vulnerability facilitate and impede the restoration of control, and shows how vulnerability can transform individuals and a community. The findings demonstrate that vulnerability can be experienced as a social process and as a state of flux and that individuals and social groups actively and constructively work to move themselves out of their vulnerable states. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for theory and for public policy.

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