Towards designing and implementing an empirically grounded research for humanitarian logistics after nepal earthquake

Towards designing and implementing an empirically grounded research for humanitarian logistics after nepal earthquake

Baharmand, Hossein (University of Agder)
Comes, M. (TU Delft System Engineering)
Lauras, Matthieu (Ecole des Mines d'Albi-Carmaux)

2017

Purpose This paper proposes a research design for effective use of qualitative data from field research in a quantitative analysis of humanitarian logistics. Design/methodology/approach Our research design is composed of qualitative and quantitative components. The qualitative part has four steps: preparation, data collection, data combination and analysis, and interpretation. We triangulate qualitative data through semi-structured interviews, observations, document review, and online surveys. We use frequency analysis to map out qualitative data to themes that were identified through literature review and best practices. After combining data from various sources, we apply content analysis and then interpret the findings. Findings The results of implementing our research design for Nepal case show its effectiveness for capturing the complexities of and the relation between variables in disasters. Its workflow and research methods exclusively enable using field insights to test theories, inform models, and find field driven research directions. We demonstrate these findings through examples from our field research after 2015 Nepal earthquake. Research limitations/implications (if applicable) Limitations: our disaster field research was constrained by the typical short time to prepare/conduct the research, lack of access to key informant and, limited sample size. Furthermore, the results of our research are based on one case. Implications: our research design resulted in an effective and a traceable use of field data for addressing challenges that practitioners were experiencing. Therefore, proposed research design can be adopted in future for conducting and empirically grounded research on HL. Practical implications (if applicable) Proposed research design enables developing field informed models that can be used as a decision support system in the immediate response. Original/value In this paper, we explicitly explain how we translated Nepal field work into a model and what the problems were in such settings.

Humanitarian logistics
Field research design
2015 Nepal earthquake

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3ee06b7e-d763-4841-8a15-9654f10b986b

Proceedings of 29th Annual NOFOMA conference

Annual NOFOMA conference 2017, 2017-06-08 → 2017-06-09, Lund, Sweden

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2017 Hossein Baharmand, M. Comes, Matthieu Lauras