Quality of life and subjective social status after five years of Mount Sinabung eruptions: disaster management and current sources of inequality in displaced, remaining and relocated communities

United Nations policies direct governments, humanitarian organisations and communities to combine sustainable development goals with disaster risk-reduction based interventions—especially in low-income nations— through a greater focus on well-being and reducing inequalities between groups. However, because multidimensional quality of life and subjective social status measures are not commonly deployed in disaster affected contexts, we investigated whether these scales could improve understanding of the effects of three ways of managing village communities after five years of post-2010 eruptions of Mount Sinabung, Indonesia: 1) displaced to or dependent upon “refugee” camps, 2) relocated to a new village 27 kilometres south, and 3) remaining in villages just outside the 3 kilometre exclusion zone. Our cross-sectional survey principally examined trauma and distress symptoms, personal resilience, quality of life dimensions (WHOQoL-BREF), variables derived from social identity research and several community-level measures. The MANOVA analysis revealed sources of contradiction between social status and environmental conditions that is similar to other research about poor communities living close to natural hazards; namely, higher environmental QoL but lower SSS for relocated communities compared to those remaining in their original villages. The results suggest that the limits of social identity and social cure approaches, providing important new evidence to encourage disaster managers to do more to address the contribution of the current environment to the levels of lower individual social status and deprivation in communities relative to others not displaced for extended periods or relocated.