Our research was broken into two parts, a 20-minute online survey and an in-person interview. The survey based things off of demographics, where in Columbia [South Carolina] they lived, how they were affected by the floods, and their stress levels. The in-person interview was with one of the faculty members or one of the undergraduate or graduate students on the team, where we asked them about how they prepared for the floods, what they did during the floods and how they’ve been recovering since the floods ended.

The students ran all the different parts of this. We had a lot of help from our faculty, but it was a very immersive experience in terms of getting to do all of the work on our own.

As a student from South Carolina coming to Duke, it was a really personal experience for me seeing my friends at the University of South Carolina or even on the coast at the College of Charleston getting affected by the floods, calling home and making sure everything was okay, so when I got the opportunity to go down and see how those people were responding—in a more academic setting—I thought it would be a really cool way to get involved with something that happened in my home state.