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INTRODUCTIONBuilding community resilience, or the capability to rebound from a disaster (Pfefferbaum et al., 2005), is a cornerstone of national health security. Recent regional meetings with stakeholders to develop the National Health Security Strategy (NHSS) revealed that questions remain unanswered as to how to develop and measure a community's resilience in the face of manmade and natural threats. To date, we have many theoretical models articulating factors that contribute to community resilience Pfefferbaum et al., 2007;Pfefferbaum et al., 2008) such as community cohesion and the ability to marshal resources quickly, but we have less empirical evidence about what constitutes the integral components of resiliency. Despite a limited evidence base, enhanced resilience is considered critical to mitigating vulnerabilities, reducing negative health consequences, and rapidly restoring community functioning. According to the Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21 (HSPD-21), resilience is essential to limiting the need for prolonged assistance post disaster. In order to improve resilience, Bruneau (2003) argues that communities must build capabilities that are characterized by robustness (the ability to withstand stress), redundancy (resource diversity), and rapidity (the ability to mobilize resources quickly). These efforts ensure that communities (and especially those with resource poor neighborhoods) will have the ability during an event to respond quickly, even when critical parts of the community are severely impacted, and to return to normal functioning with little delay.Despite an understanding that community resilience is critical, the stakeholders responsible for ensuring national health security (both government and non-governmental organizations) do not have a working definition or a clear understanding of how to measure resilience for health security. Further, we have limited information about key strategies to enhance resilience. This literature review synthesizes the existing evidence base on resilience to identify drivers for health-related emergency planning. The review lays a foundation for upcoming analyses that will provide a working definition of community resilience, identify activities for building resilience, and offer associated metrics. These activities and metrics will be integrated into the NHSS implementation plan. (BENS 2009;SERRI/CARRI 2009), far less is understood about community resilience in the context of national health security (National health security is achieved when the Nation and its people are prepared for, protected from, respond effectively to, and able to recover from incidents with potentially negative health consequences). Further, many of the articles and reports are based on theoretical and somewhat complicated frameworks with less attention to core components that can be operationalized for action. Given the focus of the NHSS on strengthening resilience over the next four years, it is essential to consider the core components of resilience that may contribute ...

Threatening things are often perceptually exaggerated, such that they appear higher, closer, of greater duration, or more intense than they actually are. According to the Resources and Perception Model (RPM) psychosocial resources can prevent this exaggeration, leading to more accurate perception. Two studies tested RPM. Study 1 showed that the perceived closeness of a threatening object (a live tarantula) but not an innocuous object (a cat toy) was moderated by induced self-worth. Further, the more self-worth that participants experienced, the less close the tarantula appeared to them. Study 2 showed that greater levels of self-esteem reduced perceived height, but only among participants prevented from holding a protective handrail while looking down. Together, these studies confirm that resources moderate the physical perception of both distance and height, that resources moderate perception of threats but not nonthreats, that different resources have similar moderating effects, and that psychosocial resources can supplant physical resources.

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This viewpoint paper argues that policy interventions can benefit from the continued use of social media analytics, which can serve as an important complement to traditional social science data collection and analysis. Efforts to improve well-being should provide an opportunity to explore these areas more deeply, and encourage the efforts of those conducting national and local data collection on health to incorporate more of these emerging data sources.Social media remains a relatively untapped source of information to catalyze policy action and social change. However, the diversity of social media platforms and available analysis techniques provides multiple ways to offer insight for policy making and decision making. For instance, social media content can provide timely information about the impact of policy interventions. Social media location information can inform where to deploy resources or disseminate public messaging. Network analysis of social media connections can reveal underserved populations who may be disconnected from public services. Machine learning can help recognize important patterns for disease surveillance or to model population sentiment. To fully realize these potential policy uses, limitations to social media data will need to be overcome, including data reliability and validity, and potential privacy risks.Traditional data collection may not fully capture the upstream factors and systemic relationships that influence health and well-being. Policy actions and social change efforts, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s effort to advance a culture of health, which are intended to drive change in a network of upstream health drivers, will need to incorporate a broad range of behavioral information, such as health attitudes or physical activity levels. Applying innovative techniques to emerging data has the potential to extract insight from unstructured data or fuse disparate sources of data, such as linking health attitudes that are expressed to health behaviors or broader health and well-being outcomes.