Arthur D. Murphy

In 1971 I began working in Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico on the factors that caused individuals and households from the rural regions of southern Mexico to migrate to the City. That work which resulted in my AM paper for the University of Chicago sparked my interested in households and the way in which they, as basic units of society, manage their resources to make a go of it in an ever changing economic and political environment. That interested culminated in a large scale study of households in Oaxaca City and 9 other cities of Mexico. In 1996 I began to research how it is that culture influences the way in which households and individuals react to and recover from natural disasters. To date my colleagues and I have carried out research on Hurricane Paulina in Acapulco as well as floods and mudslides in eastern Mexico. We are currently involved in a comparative study of how social networks impact preparation for and reactions to natural disasters. The study is based on research at the base of Popocatepetl an active volcano located 70 km SE of Mexico City and the district of Penipe, Ecuador. I am currently working on a project in conjunction with the colleagues from REDMH to see how we might use formal structures from network analysis to link with the formal models of stress and social support used by Psychologists to better provide treatment for future disaster victims. Research interests: culture and disaster recovery, household economics and demography, immigration, identity

There are 25 included publications by Arthur D. Murphy :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Alcohol use and misuse in urban Mexican men and women: An epidemiologic perspective 2006 2056 Consumption patterns and misuse of alcohol were examined in adults sampled from three cities in Mexico (n = 1933). The sample was divided into groups of persons who abstained from alcohol, drank but endorsed no misuse, or drank and endorsed at least ...
Articulation of Personal Network Structure with Gendered Well-Being in Disaster and Relocation Settings 2014 358 Women are frequently considered more vulnerable and generally experience higher levels of stress than do men in disaster environments. This is due in minor part to biological differences between men and women (e.g., pregnancy, nursing, physical stren...
Childhood Trauma and Adulthood Physical Health in Mexico. 2009 4026 Background The present study examined the effect of childhood trauma on adulthood physical health among a randomly selected sample of adults (N = 2,177) in urban Mexico. Methods Adults were interviewed about their experiences of trauma, post-traum...
Chronic Hazard: Weighing Risk against the Effects of Emergency Evacuation from Popocatépetl, México. 2007 3285 The global disasters of recent years have drawn worldwide attention to the number of people living in high-risk hazard zones that expose them to landslides, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. More than half the world's population, 3.4 billi...
Conducting Research in Other Countries 2006 680 Over the years, we have participated in interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues from various countries and disciplines as wide ranging as engineering, urban planning, architecture, medicine, and theology. As a result, we have learned a great...
Critical aspects of social networks in a resettlement setting 2015 1788 Each year, more than 30 million people worldwide are displaced by disaster, development, and conflict. The sheer magnitude of displacement points to a need for wider application of social science theories and methodologies to the special problems pos...
Cross-Cultural and Site-Based Influences on Demographic, Well-being, and Social Network Predictors of Risk Perception in Hazard and Disaster Settings in Ecuador and Mexico 2013 2844 Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places...
Data Quality in Multi-sited Cross-Sectional and Panel Studies. 2010 1364 The authors address the issues faced while collecting survey data as part of a large multisite, multidisciplinary long-term project using interviewers rather than self-administered questionnaires in a country in which the researchers are not native. ...
Early physical health consequences of disaster exposure and acute disaster-related PTSD 2006 3330 A sample of adults (N=666) was interviewed 6 months after the devastating 1999 floods and mudslides in Mexico. Comparisons between sample data and population norms pointed to significant postdisaster elevations in physical health symptoms across a va...
Epidemiology of Major Depression in Four Cities in Mexico 2006 1294 Analyses were conducted to estimate lifetime and current prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) for four representative cities of Mexico, to identify variables that influence the probability of MDD, and to further describe depression in Mexica...
Gendered Access to Formal and Informal Resources in Postdisaster Development in the Ecuadorian Andes 2014 2620 The devastating eruptions of Mount Tungurahua in the Ecuadorian highlands in 1999 and 2006 left many communities struggling to rebuild their homes and others permanently displaced to settlements built by state and nongovernmental organizations. For s...
Inequality, Social Support and Post Disaster Mental Health in Mexico 2011 337 Disasters highlight the vulnerability of people who have limited access to resources. However, based on research from Mexico, we seek-in the context of disasters-to qualify the generalization that mental health is associated with social inequality an...
Linking Broad Scale Political Economic Contexts to Fine-scale Economic Consequences in Disaster Research 2009 277 Now that it is a confirmed generalization that vulnerability to disaster impact is mediated by larger social processes, we find it compelling to link the political economy of disaster with the daily lives of individuals, households, and communities w...
Modeling Social Networks and Community Resilience in Chronic Disasters: Case Studies from Volcanic Areas in Ecuador and Mexico 2014 334 A social network framework was used to examine how vulnerability and sustainability forces affect community resilience through exposure, evacuation and resettlement. Field work, undertaken in volcanically active areas in Ecuador and Mexico, involved ...
Postdisaster PTSD over four waves of a panel study of Mexico's 1999 flood 2004 689 Samples of adults representative of Tezuitlán, Puebla and Villahermosa, Tobasco (combined N = 561), were interviewed 6, 12, 18, and 24 months after the devastating 1999 floods and mudslides in Mexico. Current DSM-IV PTSD and major depressive disorder...
Postdisaster reciprocity and the development of inequality in personal networks 2015 1645 Within the context of major changes in economics, population distribution, and lifestyles around the world, people continue to rely on personal relationships for support. People also often create or find themselves in relationships that are alternati...
Progressive Contextualization: Thinking about Extreme Events 2018 1514 This essay reviews the following works:

Side Effects: Mexican Governance under NAFTA’s Labor and Environmental Agreements. By Mark Aspinwall. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 209. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804782302.
Recovering Impunity: A Tale of Two Disasters and Governance in Northwest Mexico 2018 524 In the state of Sonora, the 2009 Hermosillo ABC Day Care Center fire and the 2014 Cananea copper mine spill highlighted how deregulation and divestiture of state services by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (P...
The role of individual well-being in risk perception and evacuation for chronic vs. acute natural hazards in Mexico. 2011 2247 This paper examines how situational and cognitive measures of well-being associated with chronic and acute hazardous conditions affect perception of risk. The research was conducted in two disaster sites in the state of Puebla, Mexico; risk perceptio...
Secondary Traumatic Stress for Trauma Researchers: A Mixed Methods Research Design 2016 2150 Forty-nine infants and toddlers were killed and 93 others were injured in the ABC Day Care Center fire disaster in Hermosillo, Mexico. This study describes the experiences of ten mental health professionals who researched the community-scale grief an...
Social Capital and the Experience of Prejudice, Aggression and Discrimination among Immigrants, US-Born Minorities, and Whites in Greensboro, NC. 2011 2371 Immigrants experience a myriad of pressures in accessing resources and negotiating culture that other city populations typically do not experience. At the same time, immigrants report use of unique protective factors, or behaviors and conditions that...
Social organization of suffering and justice-seeking in a tragic day care fire disaster 2015 1228 In 2009 a fire destroyed a day care center in Mexico, killing 49 children and leaving 100 others with serious injuries. This chapter explores how suffering and the search for justice and closure have produced a social movement of interconnected subgr...
Social support mobilization and deterioration after Mexico's 1999 flood: Effects of context, gender, and time 2005 1309 Samples of adults representative of Teziutlán, Puebla, and Villahermosa, Tobasco, were interviewed 6, 12, 18, and 24 months after the devastating 1999 flood and mudslides. The interview contained multiple measures of social support that had been norm...
The Urban System in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca 2015 1839 In this article, we explore the nature of the urban system in the Valley of Oaxaca as it has developed in the late 20th century, when Mexico joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (1986) and negotiated the North American Free Trade ...
Violence and PTSD in Mexico: Gender and regional differences 2005 493 Objective: We examined the lifetime prevalence of violence in Mexico and how different characteristics of the violent event effect the probability of meeting criteria for lifetime post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Method: We interviewed a...