An investigation into South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service’s use of social media for community disaster resilience

This is a transdisciplinary project, working in partnership with South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service (SYFR), to examine how they can use social media to support communities with their resilience. This project used an institutional logics approach to investigate the role of the institution and its impact on their communication on social media. To examine SYFR’s use of social media, data were collected from Twitter and community focus groups, and interviews were conducted. The project conducted two focus groups and 26 interviews which were assessed using thematic analysis. The project made contributions to the literature. Firstly, the research established that SYFR has no definition of resilience, but instead focused on prevention through risk communication Public Information Campaigns (PICs). This suggested an outcome-based view of community resilience. The researcher identified two key societal logics of state and community, and field level logics focused on professional skills. The results indicated that the state logics influenced the content of SYFR’s communication, and the community and field logics influenced the tone and approach, although this was also subject to disaster specific context. The Twitter analysis indicated that SYFR have a global following, which suggested the use of social media metrics may be misleading, however, their interactions suggested an active engagement with local and UK based accounts. The community data highlighted the importance of community composition in building a sense of community and resilience through both physical and social assets. These findings demonstrated the importance of building and developing linking social capital between organisations and communities prior to events that tests local resilience. These findings suggested that organisations such as SYFR are facing several challenges to support the resilience of communities. SYFR do not have the support or resources, highlighting the need for a collaborative approach between all community stakeholders to assess and develop a community’s resilience.