ORIGINAL PAPER How does resilience matter? An empirical verification of the relationships between resilience and vulnerability Kuan-Hui Elaine Lin 1,2 • Hsiang-Chieh Lee 3 • Thung-Hong Lin 4 Received: 8 June 2016 / Accepted: 8 May 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract The theoretical relationships between resilience and vulnerability have long been debated, but limited research has been done to test their relationships from an empirical perspective. This study presents an important case to demonstrate the empirical verification of the relationships. After reviewing relevant theories, we propose revisions of two widely adopted disaster risk and vulnerability formulas and apply them in a Taiwanese case of Typhoon Morakot. The data incorporate four natural hazard data sets, a Taiwan Social Change Survey of nonvictims as the reference group, and a longitudinal data set of Social Impact and Recovery Survey for Typhoon Morakot victims (2010–2012). With those data, two sets of models were constructed based on the two revised formulas. The first set of models estimates a disaster risk, defined as the probability and expected value of victimization determined by the typhoon hazard, household’s exposure, and contextual vulnerability composed of social class, ethnicity, education, and family status. The second set of models estimates an affected household’s outcome vulnerability, defined as the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11069-017-2916-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Thung-Hong Lin zoo42@gate.sinica.edu.tw Kuan-Hui Elaine Lin khelin@gate.sinica.edu.tw Hsiang-Chieh Lee hchieh@ncdr.nat.gov.tw 1 Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica, 128 Sec. 2 Academia Rd., Nankang, Taipei 11529, Taiwan 2 George Perkins Marsh Institute, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610-1477, USA 3 National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction (NCDR), 9F, No.200, Sec. 3, Beisin Rd., Sindian District, New Taipei City 23143, Taiwan 4 Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, 128 Sec. 2 Academia Rd., Nankang, Taipei 11529, Taiwan 123 Nat Hazards DOI 10.1007/s11069-017-2916-1