From Knowing to Doing: What a New Disaster Literacy Framework Tells Us About Household Resilience Capability

Most disaster education tells people what they should know. A new peer-reviewed framework asks a different question: what should people be able to do? That shift, from knowledge to skill, matters for anyone designing household resilience programmes. It is a question ResiliGroup CIC has been asking since its founding, and new research offers both corroboration and challenge.

What the researchers did

Karacaoğlu, Juran and Trivedi interviewed 20 disaster experts across the United States, drawn from federal agencies, local emergency services, non-governmental organisations and academia. Using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis, with intercoder reliability measured at Cohen's Kappa 0.82, the researchers identified and classified the skills those experts consider essential for disaster preparedness, response and recovery. The result is a structured framework called Disaster Literacy Core Skills, or DLCS.

The study was conducted under institutional ethics approval from the University of Delaware (IRB No. 2255340-1, January 2025) and funded by a TÜBİTAK postdoctoral research fellowship. The paper was published in the International Journal of Health Literacy and Science, an open-access journal now in its fourth volume.

What is disaster literacy, and why does the distinction matter?

Disaster literacy, as Karacaoğlu, Juran and Trivedi define it, is "more than just knowledge. It encompasses the skills to act efficiently in life-threatening situations, both individually and in community contexts." This definition positions disaster literacy as something a person does, not merely something a person knows.

The distinction matters because much public preparedness guidance, including the UK government's Prepare campaign, is primarily information-based. It tells households what supplies to stockpile, what risks to be aware of, and what plans to make. Information-based guidance is an important component of preparedness, but information alone cannot tell us whether people will be able to carry those actions out under real-world conditions. Knowing that you should evacuate is not the same as being able to evacuate effectively under stress, with dependants, in unfamiliar conditions.

ResiliGroup's interpretation is that this aligns with a broader shift in the resilience literature, from treating preparedness as a set of activities or knowledge to treating it as a capability. A household that has completed a checklist has taken a valuable step, but checklist completion does not by itself demonstrate how that household will act under disruption.

What are practical, cognitive, social and adaptive disaster skills?

The DLCS framework classifies disaster literacy into four skill domains, each operating across three temporal phases (before, during and after a disaster) and at two levels (individual and community).

Practical skills include first aid, evacuation planning, emergency kit preparation, navigation and debris clearance. These are observable, trainable and testable. They are closest to what most preparedness programmes already cover.

Cognitive skills include situational awareness, risk assessment, knowledge of disaster types, crisis decision-making, and the ability to learn from past disasters. These mix knowledge, perception and reasoning. Notably, cognitive skills in the DLCS framework include decision-making under stress, which goes beyond knowing the right answer to being able to identify it under pressure.

Social skills include emergency communication, community engagement, teamwork, coordination and assisting vulnerable individuals. Some of these are individual abilities exercised in social contexts. Others, such as inter-agency coordination or mass alert systems, are system-level capabilities rather than individual skills.

Adaptive skills include psychological resilience, stress management, resource adaptability, financial readiness and improvisational problem-solving. This is the most heterogeneous domain. It combines emotional regulation, economic preparedness and cognitive flexibility. Whether these share a common underlying construct or are grouped by exclusion from the other three is a question the authors do not address.

Each domain is mapped systematically across the before, during and after phases, producing detailed skill tables (Tables 1-5 in the original paper). A separate module addresses search and rescue competencies for civilians.

How strong is the evidence?

What might this mean for household resilience capability?

This is where ResiliGroup CIC adds analysis rather than merely reporting the source. Three observations emerge from mapping the DLCS framework against ResiliGroup's existing work on household resilience capability.

Preparedness is about capability, not knowledge alone

The paper corroborates a position ResiliGroup has held since its founding: that household resilience is a capability, not a collection of knowledge or activities. Karacaoğlu, Juran and Trivedi arrive at a similar conclusion from the disaster education literature, independently of the organisational resilience tradition (Duchek, 2020) and the community resilience literature (Goulden, 2025) that also inform ResiliGroup's thinking.

This matters because much of the UK's current approach to household preparedness is information-based, providing guidance on what actions to take and what supplies to keep. Information is an important foundation for preparedness. But if preparedness is a capability, then information alone may not be sufficient. The question is whether programmes also need to develop the ability to act, not just the knowledge of what action to take.

Do household preparedness tools give sufficient attention to adaptive skills?

Applying the DLCS lens raises a question about whether household preparedness tools, including our own, give sufficient attention to adaptive abilities such as coping, improvisation and using resources flexibly. The four-domain classification invites a structured comparison: how does any given preparedness programme distribute its content across practical, cognitive, social and adaptive skills?

ResiliGroup has not yet conducted a systematic content audit of ResiliKit or other household preparedness programmes against the DLCS skill types. We therefore cannot say with confidence where the gaps are. What we can say is that the DLCS framework provides a useful analytical lens for asking the question, and that ResiliGroup intends to investigate whether its own content adequately addresses adaptive capability. Whether any identified gaps should be addressed within household preparedness products, or whether adaptive capability is better developed through other means such as community programmes or mental health support, is itself an open question.

Where does the household fit?

The DLCS framework operates explicitly at two levels: individual and community. It therefore raises an important question for ResiliGroup about what happens at the household level between them. Family is mentioned in the paper in the context of evacuation plans and communication plans, but the household is not theorised as a distinct analytical level. This is not a criticism of the paper, which set out to classify disaster literacy skills at the levels it chose to study.

For ResiliGroup, whose primary analytical level is the household, the question is significant. Individual skills do not automatically aggregate into household capability. A household where one member has strong practical skills and another has strong adaptive skills is not the same as a household where both members have moderate skills across all domains.

ResiliGroup's emerging hypothesis is that household resilience capability arises through interactions between individual knowledge and skills, relationships, shared resources, responsibilities, vulnerabilities, decision-making structures, social networks and physical circumstances. How these interactions work, and whether individual-level skill frameworks can usefully inform household-level capability assessment, is a research question ResiliGroup is actively exploring. This is where we believe we can make a distinctive contribution, not by adopting the DLCS framework wholesale, but by asking what capability looks like at the level between individual and community.

Capability across preparedness, response and recovery

One of the DLCS framework's strongest features is its systematic application of the temporal axis. Different skills are needed before, during and after a disaster. Practical skills before a disaster involve planning and stockpiling. Practical skills during a disaster involve evacuation and first aid. Practical skills after a disaster involve debris clearance and sanitation. The skill type persists, but the specific competencies change substantially.

This has implications for how household resilience capability might eventually be understood and assessed. If preparedness-phase capability and response-phase capability are genuinely different, then recording progress through preparedness activities, while valuable, may not capture the full picture of a household's ability to cope with disruption. This remains an open research question.

ResiliGroup is investigating whether the temporal axis, before, during and after, should be a structural dimension of its Household Resilience Capability Framework, rather than simply an information layer within its current guidance. The evidence does not yet establish the answer, but the DLCS framework demonstrates that temporally differentiated capability is a coherent concept worth testing.

Where ResiliGroup agrees, and where we remain cautious

ResiliGroup agrees with the paper's central proposition: that disaster preparedness is multidimensional, skills-based and temporally differentiated. This is consistent with the position ResiliGroup has developed from multiple evidence sources, including Duchek's (2020) meta-capability model of organisational resilience, Goulden's (2025) research on community resilience in the UK, and ResiliGroup's own internal evidence reviews.

ResiliGroup remains cautious on several points.

First, the specific four-domain classification (practical, cognitive, social, adaptive) is unvalidated. It is a plausible grouping, not a confirmed dimensionality. Until psychometric testing demonstrates that these four domains represent empirically distinct dimensions of disaster capability, they should be treated as an analytical lens rather than a structural foundation.

Second, the US context limits transferability. The disaster management infrastructure, cultural norms, community structures and regulatory environment in the United States differ materially from the United Kingdom. Skills relevant to FEMA-supported communities may not translate directly to UK households operating within the civil contingencies framework.

Third, "disaster literacy" and "resilience capability" are not the same construct. The paper uses "literacy", "skills" and "competencies" largely interchangeably. ResiliGroup distinguishes between knowledge (what you know), skills (what you can do), capability (the underlying capacity that enables action, mediated by resources and circumstances) and resilience (the ability to anticipate, cope with and adapt to disruption). Importing DLCS terminology into ResiliGroup's framework without translation would blur distinctions that matter for both research and practice.

The evidence does not yet establish whether the DLCS four-domain classification adds analytical power to household resilience capability models, or whether it is an alternative taxonomy that would create confusion if layered onto existing frameworks. ResiliGroup is monitoring the evidence as it develops.

So what does this mean for our work?

For ResiliGroup, the value of this research is not that it gives us a new framework to adopt. It gives us a useful lens through which to challenge our own.

For ResiliKit, we will examine whether helping households complete preparedness activities is sufficiently complemented by opportunities to develop the abilities they may need when circumstances do not follow the plan. In particular, the DLCS framework gives us a reason to look more closely at adaptive abilities such as coping with uncertainty, improvising, solving unexpected problems and using available resources flexibly.

For our Household Resilience Capability Framework, the research raises two questions we now want to test. First, whether practical, cognitive, social and adaptive skills are useful components or manifestations of broader household capability. Second, whether capability should be considered across different phases, before, during and after disruption, rather than as a single static state of preparedness.

For measurement, it reinforces an important distinction in our current approach. Recording that a household has completed preparedness activities can tell us something useful about progress, but it should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of how that household will perform during disruption. Understanding that relationship between preparedness activity and underlying capability remains an open research problem.

None of these are conclusions from a single study. They are questions the study has helped us ask more precisely. We will use them to test and improve our tools as the wider evidence develops.

Questions this research creates

Rather than conclusions, this article ends with questions. These reflect where the evidence currently stands and where further work is needed.

Can household resilience capability be meaningfully assessed using an individual-level skill framework? The DLCS framework classifies what individuals and communities should be able to do. The household sits between these levels and may require its own analytical approach.

Do household preparedness tools adequately address adaptive skills? If a systematic audit reveals that adaptive skills such as psychological coping, improvisational problem-solving and resource flexibility receive less attention than practical and cognitive skills, the question becomes whether that gap should be addressed within preparedness tools or through other means such as mental health services, community programmes or education.

Does the temporal axis change what we think "prepared" means? If different capabilities are needed before, during and after a disaster, then a household that has completed its pre-disaster planning may still lack the capability to respond effectively. How resilience capability might eventually be assessed without confusing observable preparedness activities with underlying ability is an open research question.

What is the relationship between disaster literacy, disaster skills and disaster capability? The DLCS paper moves between these terms without fully distinguishing them. Clarifying the relationship matters for both measurement and programme design.

References

1. Duchek, S. (2020) 'Organizational resilience: a capability-based conceptualization', Business Research, 13, pp. 215-246. doi: 10.1007/s40685-019-0085-7.

2. Goulden, R. (2025) Community, Not Catastrophe: Restoring Social Infrastructure for Disaster Preparedness. London: The Young Foundation.

3. Karacaoğlu, Ö.C., Juran, L. and Trivedi, J. (2026) 'A Skills-Based Disaster Literacy Framework to Improve Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Recovery', International Journal of Health Literacy and Science, 4(1). Available at: https://ihelis.com (Accessed: 14 August 2026).

4. Windle, G., Bennett, K.M. and Noyes, J. (2011) 'A methodological review of resilience measurement scales', Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 9(8). doi: 10.1186/1477-7525-9-8.

About ResiliGroup CIC

ResiliGroup CIC is a community interest company researching and translating evidence relating to resilience capability, particularly household resilience capability. ResiliGroup's work includes the Household Resilience Capability Framework, the ResiliKit household preparedness tool, and an ongoing programme of evidence review and synthesis. ResiliGroup applies a structured confidence methodology to every source in its knowledge base, distinguishing clearly between what evidence supports, what it suggests, and what remains uncertain.

This article reflects the analysis of Ben Spurway and Natalie Gardner at ResiliGroup CIC, based on an independently published research paper. ResiliGroup has no affiliation with the authors of the DLCS framework. The interpretations, hypotheses and questions presented here are the authors' own, informed by but distinct from the findings of Karacaoğlu, Juran and Trivedi.