Our changing climate is intensifying the public health threat of extreme heat. Heat morbidity and mortality disproportionately burden those made most vulnerable by social, environmental, and structural factors manifesting heightened exposure and sensitivity as well as reduced adaptive capacity to heat. In order to address and prevent these negative impacts, cities are developing heat adaptation plans. There are several approaches by which researchers have positioned their work as informing decision-making, including vulnerability assessments and participatory action research. However, there remains a need to assess these approaches as applied to heat vulnerability and adaptation, with a lens towards the roles of researchers, decision-makers, and residents.
This dissertation uses mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative) to characterize heat vulnerability and understand perceptions and priorities of participants at multiple levels of assessment (individual, community, city, state).
First, we assessed the decision-making implications of, and socio-spatial context for, developing HVIs for city- and state-levels. We found that the choices made in constructing an HVI, including those regarding geographic scale and presentation, influence its results and interpretation. The strong spatial association between HVI scores constructed for the Boston area and redlining maps reinforces the challenges in interpreting sociodemographic and land use covariates absent an historical context, and broadly, the challenges of developing nuanced interpretation from publicly available covariates.
Moving from the state and city levels, we then focused in on the levels of community and individual, in the context of neighboring environmental justice and urban heat island communities: Chelsea and East Boston. We evaluated the responses of decision-makers to residents’ experiences, perspectives, and priorities around heat adaptation presented via photovoice. We engaged Chelsea and East Boston decision-makers through interviews with nineteen representatives of local government, public health, and policy organizations. Questions combined with viewing the photovoice exhibit and report elicited interviewees’ nuanced responses and valuable insights. Interviewees described how their work aligns with called-for actions by photovoice participants. They also identified barriers and challenges in taking action, gained insights from the photovoice project, and offered recommendations to expand and build on the called-for actions.
Finally, we characterized and contextualized individual-level experiences of heat exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity by integrating quantitative and qualitative data for a sample of ten Chelsea and East Boston residents. Across and within each of these participants’ data, we found high variability in exposures defined by time spent under thermal comfort thresholds, as well as in experiences of sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Participants described both taking on and trying to avoid a number of costs related to thermal comfort, in addition to the significant financial/economic costs, including impacts of heat on health and sleep disturbances, coping strategies around transportation, and other behaviors, including either leaving or staying at home on hot days. We demonstrated the value of mixed-methods analysis at an individual level and offer a framework that centers heat adaptation needs and accessibility in positioning interventions.
This dissertation provides evidence for integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in community-engaged, participatory action research approaches that link heat vulnerability assessments to heat adaptation actions. / 2026-01-04T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47903 |
| Date | 04 January 2024 |
| Creators | Heidari, Leila Marie |
| Contributors | Scammell, Madeleine K. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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