Stress and Support in Family Relationships After Hurricane Katrina

In this article, the authors merge the study of support, strain, and ambivalence in family relationships with the study of stress to explore the ways family members provide support or contribute to strain in the disaster recovery process. The authors analyze interviews with 71 displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors, and identify three family relationships that were especially important to postdisplacement experiences: marital or intimate partner, parent-adult child, and fictive kin. These relationships provided support, contributed to strain, or did both, highlighting the complexity of such relationships in the postdisaster context. Women tended to provide more support to and receive more support from family relationships than did men, especially through mother-adult daughter relationships.