Study: How Communities Shape Burn Survivors’ Return to Society

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have found that burn survivors experience different levels of success in reintegrating into their North Texas communities based on their geographic locations.

In a study published in the journal Burns, researchers in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (EPPS) combined geospatial mapping data with patient information from the Burn Model System (BMS) National Database.

"When people experience severe burn injuries and reenter the community, they experience hardships. It can be difficult to communicate with friends, go shopping or go to school because of social stigma and changes to the body," said Pyung Kim MS'25, PhD'25, the corresponding author of the study who recently earned his doctorate in public policy and political economy.

"Previous studies have focused on how individual or medical factors affect survivors' welfare, but we wanted to focus on how the community or neighborhood environments shape their experiences," he said.

The project included researchers affiliated with the North Texas Burn Rehabilitation Model System, a joint program of UT Southwestern Medical Center and Parkland Health & Hospital System. The study focused on 153 adult burn injury survivors in North Texas who were injured between 2015 and 2022 and whose data was included in the BMS National Database. That data included patient responses to a Community Integration Questionnaire (CIQ) that measures how well survivors were able to participate in their local community.

"The community integration survey scores the level of difficulty burn survivors have after returning home," Kim said. "It quantifies how survivors experienced community reentry."

The researchers compared preinjury scores to scores at six and 12 months after injury and created county-level maps to visualize changes across time in questionnaire scores.

North Texas counties were categorized into two groups: counties with consistent declines in patient CIQ scores over the 12-month, postinjury period and all other counties with burn injury survivors. Counties including Dallas and Tarrant saw a decrease in CIQ scores over 12 months, while Collin County saw an increase in CIQ scores - indicating better experiences with community reentry.

Researchers then compared county-level community characteristics between these two groups while focusing on four factors: socioeconomic conditions, access to health care, public safety and infrastructure.

They found that areas of North Texas with significantly higher levels of poverty, higher unemployment rates, higher crime rates and lower access to healthy food options were more difficult than other places for burn survivors to reintegrate successfully into their communities.

"We first conducted the geospatial mapping to visualize the geographic disparities across North Texas counties, then we conducted some statistical analysis to examine the determinants of the disparities," said Kim, who is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies and Data Science, where he is conducting research at the intersection of geography, data science and public policy.

"I believe studies like this that incorporate geospatial information systems and spatial data science can provide crucial information to government and community leaders as they prioritize limited resources," he said.

Dr. Dohyeong Kim, professor of public policy, geospatial information sciences and social data analytics and research at UT Dallas, is a co-author of the study. He leads the Spatial Health AI Research Partnership, a global interdisciplinary collaboration dedicated to research and education that addresses challenges in public health and other areas through the integration of geospatial science, artificial intelligence and data-driven policy analysis.

"Geospatial mapping transforms abstract data into a visual road map, allowing us to pinpoint health disparities and deploy resources exactly where they are needed most," he said. "It's no longer just about tracking diseases; it's about visualizing the heartbeat of a community to ensure no neighborhood is left behind."

Other UT Dallas authors of the study are Dr. Richard Scotch, professor emeritus of sociology and of public policy and political economy, and Dohyo Jeong MS'25, PhD'25, now a postdoctoral scholar in public health at the University of Kentucky.

Dr. Karen J. Kowalske, the Charles and Peggy Galvin Professor in Physical Medicine at UT Southwestern, also is a study author.

The research was funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (grant number 90DPBU0006), which is part of the U.S. Department and Health and Human Services.

Media Contact: Jessica Good, UT Dallas, 972-883-4319, [email protected], or the Office of Media Relations, UT Dallas, (972) 883-2155, [email protected].