A community is resilient if it is able to “bounce forward” after an adverse event. Community resilience is generally considered a process that is indicated by community adaptation following a disaster or crisis. In this article, we employ media and communication perspectives (communication ecology, public relations, and strategic communication) to review the community resilience literature and propose a revised community resilience model. Our proposed model includes four components: communication systems and resources, community relationships, strategic communication processes, and community attributes. Each of these components includes several elements that are described. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the Resilience and Coping Intervention (RCI) with college students. College students (aged 18-23) from a large Midwest US university who volunteered for a randomized controlled trial during the 2015 spring semester. College students were randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 64) or a control (n = 65) group. Intervention participants received three 45-minute RCI sessions over subsequent weeks. All participants completed pre- and post-intervention assessments at the beginning of Week 1 and end of Week 3. Student resilience, coping, hope, stress, depression, and anxiety were assessed. RCI participants reported significantly more hope and less stress and depression from Week 1 to Week 3 compared with control participants. Results for resilience also approached statistical significance. Effect sizes were small to moderate. This study found preliminary evidence that RCI is an effective resilience intervention for use with college students.

Disasters, both natural and human-caused, can generate significant stressors for individuals, families, and communities, and research has documented an increase in the prevalence and severity of violence against women following these events. This article reviews research documenting the prevalence and severity of violence against women in disaster settings and provides a framework for intimate partner violence professionals to cultivate resources and capacities that promote women’s safety and well-being before, during, and after a disaster. Framework objectives include increasing awareness and capacity to respond, promoting safety planning, ensuring basic needs are met, providing comfort and support, connecting to long-term services, and promoting psychosocial recovery.

Prior research has found that infectious disease outbreaks such as that of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are associated with adverse mental health, especially among individuals with more exposure to COVID-19. Less studied are the possible relationships of media use and interpersonal communication as they relate to COVID-19 exposure and mental health outcomes. In the current study, a structural equation model tested the direct and indirect relationships of a variety of proximity variables including COVID-19 exposure, media use (traditional and social), and interpersonal communication on stress and depression with a U.S. sample of 1,545 adults. Results found that COVID-19 exposure had a direct effect on stress and an indirect effect on stress and depression through media use (traditional and social) and interpersonal communication.

Natural and human-caused disasters receive extensive media coverage that often includes images, video, and descriptions of death, injury, and destruction. Individual exposure to disaster media has been found to be associated with a variety of effects (e.g., mental health reactions) among children and adults in numerous studies. Despite evidence of disaster media effects, the literature is not well organized. To improve integration, we conducted a systematic review and used the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM) to organize results. We analyzed 66 studies, representing 78,643 participants, and found that the disaster media effects literature is built upon the theory of psychological trauma, that the role of uncertainty and social aspects of disaster media effects are understudied, and that transactional disaster media effect studies are nonexistent. Our analysis also indicates that adding a contextual category to the DSMM model is beneficial in synthesizing media effects. Opportunities for future research are discussed.