Collective Adaptive Responses Through Coping and Sensemaking Under Stress

Abstract

This study explores adaptive response mechanisms as an appraisal of confronted stress through people’s activities of sending and receiving tweets with other Twitter users to share their thoughts, opinions or information on responses to a man-made disaster. We propose a model with a theoretical integration that represents the varying relations between stress and individuals’ responses over time. Using Twitter data from April 16, 2014, on the Sewol ferry disaster in Korea, our study found that the development of the collective response was characterized by individuals’ recurrent attempts to make sense of the causes and outcomes of an unexpected event in terms of time-dependent flows during the occurrence of the event. Collective sensemaking recurred when people could not make sense of the causes and results of unexpected events to facilitate the coping process. Our model provides insights into when and how a trigger event such as a disaster influences the development of shared collective response patterns.