Research Findings On The Psychology Of Floods - An Essay On Effects.

Discuss about the Effects of Floods on Psychology.

Human psychology responds significantly to any external effect; whether negative or positive. However, the psychological response depends on the person, although there some interactions where different people react similarly. The mode of reaction an individual’s psychology generates depends whether one feels happy or disturbed. In this manner, the level of happiness and anger will vary significantly depending on the intensity of the external effect among other factors such as the pre-state of the victim’s psychology. Some other confounders might be the environment, which constitutes of people and material stuff. Also, quality of life for an individual might determine the intensity of effect an individual will endure (Zanna, 2005).

In this paper, floods are used a predictor to the psychological score change of the victims. Some other possible predictors and confounders are included in the dataset to determine whether they are significantly related to change in psychological score. The variables include age, place of residence, the impact of the floods, the health state of the floods, the environmental state, social support & family function and a dummy variable on whether a victim lives alone or not. These variables will be used to answer the research questions using the relevant statistical methods. The main objective of this study is to determine whether there is a difference in psychological score change before and after floods. The change in psychological score will also be compared among the possible confounders such as age, gender and level of impact. A regression model will be developed to determine the best fit in predicting the pre-psychological score.

Table 1: Descriptive statistics

The average age for the participants of the study is 33.68 with a standard deviation of 9 years. Before the floods, the physical health status had a mean of 16.02 with a standard deviation of 1.99. The environmental domain before the floods had an average score of 14.1527 with a standard deviation of 2.229. There is an approximately normal distribution of the social support scale because the average value is between the maximum and minimum values. The family functioning score is slightly lower than the social support. This indicates that the participants’ psychological states might be much contributed by social support than family functionality. Based on the average statistics, there is no much difference between the pre-flood and post-flood psychological scores.

Table 2: Place of residence

Place of residence

70.33% of the study participants live in urban while 29.57% in regional areas.

Table 3: Is the participant living alone?

94.48% of the respondents do not live alone in their places of residence. Therefore, this variable might be a very good predictor of the psychological score.

Table 4: Impact of the floods for you in terms of the property you were living in

63 (34.6%) entries of the impacts of floods were missing the dataset. The analysis will only use the valid entries. Table 4 shows that 42.86% of the participants had moderate/major flood impacts, 26.0.5% with minor impacts and 31.09% of the respondents reported to have been not affected by the floods.

Table 5: Cross tabulation between living alone and pre-flood score below 15

Table 6: Chi-square tests

We will use the Fisher's exact test because one cell in the contingency table has count below 5. Therefore, we conclude that there is no association between pre-flood score below 15 and an individual living alone.

Are age, social support score and family functioning score predictors of pre-flood psychological score?

Table 7: Initial Model summary

11.3% of the variation in pre-flood psychological score is explained by family functioning scale before the flood, age and social support scale before the floods.

Table 8: Model's ANOVA

The p-value for the ANOVA test is below the significance level, hence concluding that the model is statistically significant (Weinberg & Abramowitz, 2008).

Table 9: Model coefficients 

Social support scale is the only significant variable in the model with a p-value less than 0.001.

Table 10: Second model summary

Including place of residence in the model reduces the Adjusted R Square value from 11.3% to 10.9%. This reduces the significance of the model. Place of residence turns out to be insignificant in the second model. Therefore, the only significant variable is social support scale (Draper, 2014).

Table 11: The minimum model summary

Social support scale explains 9.7% of the variation in the pre-flood psychological domain.

Table 12: The minimum model coefficients

Predicting a male with a social support scale of 40.

Is there a difference in the post psychological score between men according to the level of the impact of floods

Table 13: One way ANOVA test

The p-value for the one way ANOVA test is less than 0.05, hence concluding that there is a difference in means of post-flood psychological domain between different levels of flood impacts (Zhang, 2013).

Table 14: Post-hoc test using LSD method

The post-flood psychological score averages of no impact and moderate or major impact groups are significantly different. Also, minor and moderate/major impact groups have a significantly different mean value of post-flood psychological scores (Roberts & Russo, 2014).

Is the mean change in psychological score change between pre and post-flood the same for men who experienced no/limited impacts compared to those who experienced moderate/major impacts

The Levene’s test p-value is less than 0.05, hence concluding that the variances of psychological differences are not equal between the two groups.

Table 16: Independent test of equality of means

According to table 16, we conclude that the difference in means of psychological differences between men who experienced no/minor impacts compared to those who experienced moderate/major flood impacts is significant (Weinberg & Abramowitz, 2008).

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can state that the there is no sufficient information to detect an association between living alone or otherwise and having pre-flood psychological score below 15 or above. Social support scale for the men participants emerged as a significant predictor of pre-flood psychological score. A statistically significant difference in post-flood psychological score was detected between no impact and moderate/major flood impact groups. Also, minor and moderate/major flood impacts groups were found to have significantly different means of post-flood psychological score. Finally, a significant difference in means of the psychological difference between those who experienced no or minor impacts compared to those who experienced moderate/major flood impacts were detected.

References

Draper, N. (2014). Applied Regression Analysis. Wiley-Interscience.

Roberts, M., & Russo, R. (2014). A student's guide to analysis of variance (3rd ed.). Abingdon: Routledge.

Weinberg, S., & Abramowitz, S. (2008). Statistics using SPSS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zanna, M. (2005). Advances in experimental social psychology. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Academic Press.

Zhang, J. (2013). Tests of Linear Hypotheses in the ANOVA under Heteroscedasticity. International Journal of Advanced Statistics and Probability, 1(2). https://dx.doi.org/10.14419/ijasp.v1i2.908