Social Vulnerability Index

The Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) measures how vulnerable a community is to the harmful effects of disasters and public-health emergencies, based on the social and economic characteristics of the people who live there. The CDC/ATSDR version, introduced by Flanagan and colleagues in 2011, percentile-ranks census variables, groups them into themes (socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, racial and ethnic minority status and language, and housing type and transportation), and aggregates them into an overall ranking for each census tract or county. It builds on the broader social-vulnerability concept developed by Cutter, Boruff, and Shirley, whose 2003 Social Vulnerability Index to environmental hazards (SoVI) used factor analysis to show that susceptibility to disaster losses is socially patterned. The SVI is widely used to plan disaster response, allocate resources, and target public-health interventions toward the communities least able to cope.