Resilience and trauma: Expanding definitions, uses, and contexts.

Abstract

Resilience concepts have gained widespread use in scholarship and practice, yet definitions, measures, and uses of resilience remain complex and multifaceted. Resilience has been described as both an outcome and a process and has been used to refer to both individuals and communities. Scholars have also critiqued resilience theories and practice models as being difficult to define, too heavily focused on individual psychometric properties, and obscuring structural causes of adversity. While there are significant and powerful benefits to a more strengths-based approach to trauma and recovery, vague and contradictory definitions and critical questioning of the social justice consequences of a reliance on resilience indicate a need for continued interrogation of the concept of resilience in trauma scholarship. A host of disciplines from social work to psychology to family social science incorporate resilience concepts into their knowledge bases and are all well positioned to engage in a critical conversation about the definition, utility, and future of the concept. This special issue is a collection of 14 articles that contribute to the discourse of trauma through the resilience lens. Most of the articles in this special issue report on original research that examines issues relevant to trauma psychology and trauma practice. The others add to the discourse on the mechanisms that account for how and why we are resilient following traumatic events and how best to prepare for and thrive after the next traumatic event.

Factors Associated With Post-traumatic Growth Among Healthcare Workers Who Experienced the Outbreak of MERS Virus in South Korea: A Mixed-Method Study

“…PTG is different from resilience in that PTG is an adaptive response, growth, and gain from traumatic events. In contrast, resilience is an individual characteristic or behavioral tool related to coping mechanisms (McCleary and Figley, 2017). Even though the relationship between resilience and PTG are well documented, it is unclear how resilience leads to PTG among trauma-exposed individuals.…”

Correlates of post‐traumatic growth among nursing professionals: A cross‐sectional analysis

“…Of note, PTG is distinguished from related cognitive rebuilding concepts (e.g. resiliency, and coping skills) in that PTG involves positive progression beyond levels of pre-trauma transformation, whereas resiliency and coping skills are not direct measurements of cognitive growth themselves, but rather are characteristics and behavioural tools (McCleary & Figley, 2017). Moreover, although resiliency and coping skills are not necessarily measures of growth, they are indeed measurable and may demonstrate other dimensions of psychological changes experienced subsequent to challenging life events.…”

Cross- Cultural Entitlement and Resilience: A Suggestion for Western Cognitive Therapy

“…Measured through questionnaires (Lang & Connell, 2017) as in the case of resilience, trauma surfaces in the Western world, mostly among marginalized populations such as in racial minorities (Kerig, Bennett, Chaplo, Modrowski & McGee, 2016) or in social deviants (Mccleary & Figley, 2017), in the United States of America. In the developing world however, trauma is omnipresent, affecting the majority, if not the entirety of the population.…”

“…The example of adaptability and resilience created by individuals after times of armed conflict, has also emphasized the role of a strong sense of religiosity (Norris & Anbarasu, 2017), trusting political and governmental proxies (Bleich, 2017), maintaining a feeling of solidarity between their cultural relatives (Mccleary & Figley, 2017), cherishing their cultural beliefs (Berger, 2017) and appreciating the values of hosting societies in the case of relocation (Motti -Stefanidi, 2018), in aiding the prosperous survival of humans that have faced death threats.…”