The Temporal Elements of Psychological Resilience: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Individuals, Families, and Communities

Abstract

Psychological resilience has become a popular concept. Owing to that popularity, the word resilience has taken on myriad and often overlapping meanings. To be a useful framework for psychological research and theory, the authors argue, the study of resilience must explicitly reference each of four constituent temporal elements: (a) baseline or preadversity functioning, (b) the actual aversive circumstances, (c) postadversity resilient outcomes, and (d) predictors of resilient outcomes. Using this framework to review the existing literature, the most complete body of evidence is available on individual psychological resilience in children and adults. By contrast, the research on psychological resilience in families and communities is far more limited and lags well behind the rich theoretical perspective available from those literatures. The vast majority of research on resilience in families and communities has focused primarily on only one temporal element, possible predictors of resilient outcomes. Surprisingly, however, almost no scientific evidence is actually available for community or family resilient outcomes. We close by suggesting that there is room for optimism and that existing methods and measures could be relatively easily adapted to help fill these gaps. To that end, we propose a series of steps to guide future research.

Demographic Characteristics and Sense of Danger Predicting New Measure of Individual Resilience Following a War

“…The present study corroborates a number of studies which indicate significant prediction of individual resilience by demographic characteristics: age, gender and economic condition [17,[56][57][58]; community type, age, and levels of religiosity and preparedness, predicting community and national resilience [29,52]; level of exposure and individual resilience [17]. Our result has indicated that these four demographic variables and exposure examined in our study explained 27% of individual resilience SVR.…”

Resilience among Students from the Majority and Minority Group: The Israeli Case

“…Bonanno (2005) has defined individual resilience as the individual's ability to maintain a stable level of functioning following traumatic events and as a "trajectory of healthy functioning across time" (p. 136). Bonanno and associates have argued further that most people display a high level of resilience after a PTE (Bonanno, Romero & Klein, 2015). Most studies on resilience have focused on individual resilience and have indicated that it is a key issue in buffering negative psychological consequences of major adversities (Suedfeld, 2015).…”

“…Resilience indicators can be based on self-report tools as well as on measuring various actual behaviors at different times after the PTE has taken place (Bonanno, 2004;Bonanno, Romero & Klein, 2015). (b) Resilience predictors are based on measures taken before a potential traumatic event has taken place and are mostly based on self-report tools (e.g., Kimhi & Eshel, 2015).…”

Adolescent friendships predict later resilient functioning across psychosocial domains in a healthy community cohort

“…Therefore, having low resilience at some time does not preclude the presence of future resilience or vice versa. Consequently, it is important to study adolescent resilient functioning, and its influences, over time (Bonanno et al 2015). Understanding how adolescent resilient functioning varies over time and revealing how various factors influence such variation remains to be fully elucidated.…”