Comparing Social Vulnerability and Population Loss in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

This project compares social vulnerability to population change in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María in 2017, finding that more vulnerable areas lost greater proportions of their population. It uses the original 2016 Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) for Puerto Rico, published as open data by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to create a revised version of the index using only 10 variables (SVI-10) based on exploratory factor analysis. Notably, the revised SVI-10 does not include variables for "minority status" or "English language proficiency" as the assumed relationship of these variables to social vulnerability does not hold in Puerto Rico. Compared to the original SVI, the revised SVI-10 was found to be more strongly associated with variations in population loss at the census tract level in Puerto Rico, after controlling for hazard intensity using a spatial average for peak wind speed. These data may be used to compare the SVI-10 to population change or other variables of interest in Puerto Rico. In some cases, the SVI-10 may be used as an alternative to the original 2016 SVI for Puerto Rico.
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This published dataset contains original variables from the CDC's 2016 Social Vulnerability Index for Puerto Rico, including census tract identifiers for the 884 included tracts, the 15 vulnerability indicators, the overall SVI, and the four sub-themes of the SVI. For more information on these variables, please see the documentation at https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/documentation/SVI_documentation_2016.html. The dataset then includes the following variables: average peak wind speed in each tract (windspeed), total 2018 population (totpop18), population change from 2016-2018 (popchg), percent population change from 2016-2018 (pctchg), and the new SVI-10 measure (SVI_10).