Social vulnerability refers to the resilience of communities when confronted by external stressors, such as:
- natural disasters
- human caused diasters
- disease outbreaks
Socially vulnerable populations are those who have special needs, including, but not limited to:
- people without vehicles
- people with disabilities
- older adults
- people with limited English proficiency
Recognizing a need to quantify this information, the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) produced the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). More information about this resource can be found at the at a glance page for the CDC SVI. In addition, more details about each of the features can be found in the link. These features include percentile rankings for socioeconomic charateristics for each census tract, from the American Community Survey.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Socialvulnerability Index (SVI) is a measure of potential negative effects on communities. It is composed of four primary domains:
- socioeconomic status
- household characteristics
- minority status and language
- housing and transportation
This dataset is for the year 2018. Additional years can be downloaded at the CDC website.