Resilience has become a key twenty-first century paradigm in research, practice and policy development concerning individuals’ mental health and wellbeing. Resilience is a process of person-context interaction where individuals navigate and negotiate their psychological, social, cultural and physical resources in order to improve their wellbeing and alter adversity. The existing literature addressing resilience is extensive; however, most of the studies have been conducted in European countries limiting the generalisability of models to Western cultures. Therefore, there is an emerging need to examine the applicability of resilience models to non-Western countries. Overcoming and challenging adversity conditions might require different practices in non-Western contexts.
The Resilience Framework, developed by Professor Angie Hart and colleagues in Brighton, is a strategic approach that promotes wellbeing by supporting its users to act tactically about where to direct their efforts when building resilience. This research will help to refine the internationally renowned Resilience Framework in the light of empirical evidence and contextual diversity. This will be accomplished through cross-cultural investigation of the generalizable versus context specific aspects of the Resilience Framework across Western (UK) and non-Western (Malaysia and Turkey) cultures using a Q-methodology. Q-methodology will help to evidence the Resilience Framework as a set of interventions and will produce a holistic picture of individuals’ resilience.
Project time-frame
This research project commenced in May 2015.
Project aims
The aims of this research project are to:
- Investigate whether the Resilience Framework operates similarly or differently across diverse contexts determined by state/national boundaries.
- Adapt the Resilience Framework for non-Western life orientations.
- Develop an assessment tool for the RF that can provide both breadth and depth of resilience knowledge; that is available in multiple languages (English, Malaysian and Turkish).
Project findings and impact
The research project is ongoing and outputs, findings and impact will be updated in due course.
The Resilience Framework for Children & Young People has been translated into Turkish.
Project team
Suna Eryigit-Madzwamuse
Angie Hart
Project partners
Centre of Resilience for Social Justice, University of Brighton, UK
Boingboing, UK
Amalia Madihie, University of Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
Salmah Mohamad Yusoff, University of Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
Emel Teksoz, Mustafa Kemal University, Turkey
Rhian Adams, Newport Mind, Wales
Co-production in promoting resilience – what does this mean for schools?
Co-production is a value-based approach that views people who use a service as assets with important knowledge and skills. It harnesses this experience, knowledge and skill to promote positive change, and design, produce and deliver better services.
The Imagine Programme
The Imagine Programme brings together different research projects working across universities and their local communities. Using the new knowledge we gather, we are imagining how communities might be different. We are researching, and experimenting with different forms of community-building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience.
Our schools-based resilience projects
Our schools-based resilience research adapts the Resilience Framework for use in schools and helps schools make resilient moves across the whole school community. Many different types of school are working with us on this.
Resilience to re-offending: young men overcoming adversity
This practitioner research combines support work with young people who have experienced challenging times and the Resilience Framework. By examining the mechanisms that promoted resilience amongst young men who were offending, the study took the Resilience Framework and applied it to the data collected on the young men’s experiences.
Can kinship carers benefit from learning about resilience?
This is a Collaborative Action Research project using Photo-elicitation to represent kinship carers experiences of trying to use Resilient Therapy and individual interviews with children to find out what helps them through difficult times.
Can resilience be measured?
Can resilience be measured? Finding adequate and good ways of measuring is important because we would like to track the effectiveness of resilient building approaches in daily practice, to make sure that people benefit from our interventions, check the quality of our work and continue developing our interventions.
