Community-focused Maui recovery research

The survey focuses on people who lived, worked, or owned a business in West Maui or Kula during the Maui wildfires in August 2023. Participant recruitment has been facilitated by community and government partners. Participants receive a $20 gift card for the first survey and a $10 gift card for each monthly follow-up survey that they take. It is not a closed cohort, i.e. eligible people can join anytime. The survey form is available online in six languages: English, Spanish, Tagalog, Ilocano, Tongan and Vietnamese. Recruitment has primarily relied on multilingual email outreach, but also physical flyers available in community spaces and at community events.

The survey questionnaire is designed to follow key indicators such as income, employment, housing type, rent, residential and job location over time. Participants are asked about their situation before the wildfires, followed by monthly updates on the same set of questions starting in August 2024. The survey questionnaire is available below.

We have used a wide range of data verification checks and individual participant follow-up to eliminate fraudulent responses from the data. We are confident that this data represents real fire-impacted people. After data cleaning, the August sample had 402 respondents from 374 households. All housing and income-related data is reported on a household basis whereas employment and needs data is based on individual-level records