ABSTRACT
Resilience as a resource relies on individuals to nurture it on the local level. Given that human action is largely influenced by perception, how individuals perceive their community’s resilience may shape its development. This chapter examines the intersection of perceptions and realities of local disaster resilience in two ways. First, resilience “realities” based on approximations of adaptive capacity are overlapped with perceptions of the adaptive process to identify the county characteristics associated with high, moderate, and low resilience. Second, perceptions of county resilience held by county emergency managers are compared to “realities” of resilience to determine which conditions are related to accurate assessments of resilience. This is important because it may point to what hazards scholars call cognition or the recognition of risk related to hazards. Where cognition is lacking, appropriate action may not be taken to properly respond to hazardous events. This can accelerate a situation into a disaster and detract from a community’s resilience.
