A system in ‘fight mode’? - resilience and social capital in a community emerging from conflict.

Boyle, Clionagh (2024) A system in ‘fight mode’? - resilience and social capital in a community emerging from conflict. In: Resilience and Wellbeing in Young Children, Their Families and Communities. Routledge, London. ISBN 9781032385709 (Accepted for Publication)

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Abstract

The literature on resilience, the capacity of some children to survive and thrive in spite of adverse circumstances had its emergence in the psychological disciplines. In an early collection of studies, resilience was conceptualised by Anthony (1987), as the phenomenon of the ‘invulnerable child’ observed in children who appeared to thrive despite a parent’s serious mental health challenges. Masten’s (2001) later study described resilience as the ‘ordinary magic’ of children growing up in poverty attaining positive outcomes. The focus of resilience research on the child, the parent and the immediate microsystem of home and family has been a dominant shaping force in the field. As a result, in policy and practice, the design of interventions to support resilience in early childhood has principally focused on supporting behavioural change in the parent child dyad (Mc Leod and Nelson 2000; Furlong and McGilloway 2015; Gardner 2019). This concentration on the capacity of the individual child or parent has been criticised amongst others by Rutter (2005) who advocated for closer examination of social and environmental factors rather than the child’s capacity to navigate these. A socio ecological approach to interventions aimed at supporting resilience, drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s model (1976) has been conceptualised by Ungar (2006) whose premise is that ‘the social ecology surrounding the intervention and the pathways to resilience children travel are as or more important than the qualities of the child him or herself’ (Ungar 2006, p.55). Drawing from Ungar’s work, VanderPlaat (2016) invites researchers to explore resilience through the ‘sociological imagination’ cautioning that focusing on adversity and resilience as residing only in the immediate domain of home and family not only ‘deflects our gaze from the social structures that cause and maintain these social conditions in the first place, but also limits our capacity to deal with these issues on a broad scale’ (p191). This chapter will therefore deploy the sociological imagination in the exploration of an ecological case study of early intervention to illuminate the dynamics of resilience not just within the microsystem but at the exosystemic and macrosystemic levels.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
Depositing User:	Clionagh Boyle
Date Deposited:	05 May 2023 08:52
Last Modified:	08 Nov 2024 13:29
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3912

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