Closing the gap between disaster mental health research and practice: Evidence for socio-ecological mental health interventions through multilevel research.

Socio-ecological interventions assume that there are ‘links’ between the individual process that determinesdisaster mental health and the social context one lives in. However, there is insufficient empirical basis for this claim. This paper summarizes the main findings from a research programme, in which two advanced statistical techniques on data from two floods were applied, respectively Uttar Pradesh, India 2008 and Morpeth, England, 2008. By means of multilevel structural equation modelling it was found that individual psychosocial resources (coping behaviour and social support) are employed more parsimoniously and effectively when disaster affected individuals can rely on a trustworthy and effective social community. Additionally, usingmultilevel con¢rmatory factor analyses to address screening outcomes yielded two methodologicalproblems: nested variance due to the disaster context and poor construct validity.These can be illustrated,but not dismissed without applying advanced statistical analyses. The findings strongly suggest that community interventions promoting social context and individual interventions not only share the same objective, but also impact mental health via the same individual mechanisms.FSW – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide