Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Coastal Virginia Social Vulnerability Index At The Block Group Level, Sarah Stafford, Schyler Vander Schaaf

Data

Following other social vulnerability indexes, including the SoVI® developed by the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, this vulnerability index is based on a principal component analysis (PCA). PCA is a statistical technique that takes as its input a matrix of interrelated socioeconomic variables – in this case those considered to measure various dimensions of social vulnerability – and creates a new set of orthogonal principal components that extract the important variation the underlying input data while reducing the noise and redundancy in the data. After conducting the PCA, the researcher combines the newly created …