Comparing Vulnerability Indices in Malawi, Poster 16

Vulnerability indexes and vulnerability maps are important tools in understanding the spatial distribution of vulnerability and to aid in effectively crafting strategies to distribute resources for mitigation purposes.... [ view full abstract ]

Vulnerability indexes and vulnerability maps are important tools in understanding the spatial distribution of vulnerability and to aid in effectively crafting strategies to distribute resources for mitigation purposes. However, there isn’t a single agreed upon methodology to create a vulnerability index and scholars are still unsure about their reliability. Despite that, indexes are often directly used for decision-making. We sought to compare vulnerability indexes for Malawi, our case-study, to better understand at which levels these indexes differed and to test if they tended to agree in their estimate of vulnerability. A challenge that arose from this approach was coming up with a methodology and choosing a scale that most fairly and accurately allowed us to compare the indexes. We compared four different indexes measuring social vulnerability first in regards to their methodology and then their results by normalizing the vulnerability scores by quantiles and by using the Spearman’s correlation coefficient to determine statistical correlation. We concluded that the different methodologies varied significantly. When it comes to the indexes themselves, when there was enough data to provide conclusive results, there seems to be a correlation between the index results in most instances.

These results reveal agreement between different vulnerability indexes but also that an accurate understanding of the information provided by each index is reliant upon understanding the process by which it was made and therefore researchers should seek to, as much as possible, make that information accessible, clear and free of jargon.