Many studies have shown that economic and political freedom better predict overall satisfaction than income or material consumption. However, in the context of post-disaster reconstruction, whether freedom of choice in reconstruction is a better predictor of satisfaction with newly reconstructed houses than the extent of material reconstruction per se is much less clear. In this paper, employing ordinal logistic regression analysis to data collected in the aftermath of Nepal’s 7.8 Mw 2015 earthquake, we find that freedom of choice in the reconstruction process predicts households’ post-disaster satisfaction with newly reconstructed houses better than the extent of physical reconstruction per se. Interestingly, many seemingly important predictors such as income, education, location, occupation, household size and age of respondents that we investigated are not statistically significant. Apart from freedom of choice, only gender and ethnicity are significant in explaining satisfaction with newly reconstructed houses. We also find a negative correlation between satisfaction level and inequality in such levels among ethnic groups; the reverse is true in the case of gender. These findings underscore the importance of freedom, and ethnic or gender-specific policies, in promoting well-being in post-disaster recovery.

许多研究表明，经济和政治自由比收入或物质消费更能预测整体满意度。然而，在灾后重建的背景下，重建的自由选择是否比物质重建本身的程度更能预测对新重建房屋的满意度。在本文中，对 2015 年尼泊尔 7.8 Mw 地震后收集的数据采用顺序逻辑回归分析，我们发现重建过程中的选择自由比实际重建的程度更能预测家庭对新重建房屋的灾后满意度本身。有趣的是，许多看似重要的预测因素，如收入、教育、地点、职业、我们调查的受访者的家庭规模和年龄在统计上不显着。除了选择的自由，只有性别和种族在解释对新建房屋的满意度方面具有重要意义。我们还发现满意度水平与族群之间此类水平的不平等呈负相关；性别的情况正好相反。这些调查结果强调了自由以及种族或性别特定政策对于促进灾后恢复福祉的重要性。