Post‐Crisis Recovery and the Sequence It Assumes: Program Design Implications From a Three‐Year Panel of Disaster Survivors in South Korea

Disaster relief programs assume a sequence: support provided to survivors restores their everyday functioning, and restored functioning improves their quality of life. The sequence shapes what such programs target, whom they enroll, and how their success is judged, yet it has rarely been examined with data that establish temporal order. This study examines it in three annual waves (2017–2019) of a South Korean national panel of survivors who received public disaster relief ( N = 1659), using a latent cross‐lagged panel model that controls each construct's prior level. Perceived social support did not predict higher later social adjustment or quality of life. Social adjustment predicted quality of life a year later (β = 0.238), and higher adjustment preceded higher perceived support (β = 0.141 and 0.195). These patterns held under cohort fixed effects and across missing‐data treatments, and support did not predict later adjustment in any disaster cohort but one. Within survivors over time, support did not predict higher later adjustment, and the adjustment–quality‐of‐life association was smaller. The data therefore do not support the assumed sequence. They point instead to setting functional recovery as an explicit program objective, enrolling survivors by functional status rather than by exposure alone, and measuring success by what survivors regain rather than by what was delivered.