A systematic review of the use of theories in social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation research

There is an increasing rise in the number of publications addressing social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation (SVRA) aspects of natural hazards and climate change. Despite the abundance of research in this field, a systematic understanding of how these studies are theoretically grounded is lacking.

In this study, we conducted a systematic review of 4432 articles that address SVRA across a range of disciplinary fields (e.g. psychology, sociology, geography, mathematics) and natural hazards (e.g. floods, droughts, landslides, storm surges, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions). We investigate the extent to which these studies explicate the frameworks, theoretical constructs or theories they rely on.

Our findings indicate that about 90% of the studies under consideration do not explicitly refer to a theoretical underpinning. Overall, theories focusing on individuals' SVRA were more frequent than those focusing on systems, society, groups, and networks. Furthermore, the uptake of theories varied according to the hazard investigated and field of knowledge, being more frequent in wildfire and flood studies and articles published in social science journals.

We argue that the abundance of empirical material in SVRA research that lacks explicit theoretical grounding is objectionable. As a result, SVRA research seems to spin in circles: researchers repeatedly conduct similar analyses in different geographical settings with inconsistent or incommensurable findings. Thus, we recommend making theoretical considerations salient to foster more transparent, comparable, and robust empirical research on SVRA.