What is Resilience Research?

Resilience research as a quest for social justice

Research into the meaning of resilience and what it means to be resilient leads our academics and community researchers on an investigation to understand what takes place for those people - children, families, vulnerable adults and workers - who positively adapt to hardship.

Researchers in the University of Brighton worked for over twenty years with multiple and changing ideas as to what resilience means and what resilience can mean. Their work, in Britain and across different parts of the globe, brings communities together that can answer the question together: what is our resilience, and how can we help diverse communities find and build their resilience to shared and individual challenges?

For the research from the University of Brighton academics and the social network they established, Boingboing, resilience in the face of adversity is not just about an individual’s inner psychological resources or innate characteristics; it involves a combination of ‘nature’ (what a child is born with) and ‘nurture’ (what they learn and are offered along the way). Our researchers - academics and the wider community - seek to make resilience and resilient therapy an embedded treatment, one which works across whole communities to improve futures through resilient practices. ( Hart, A., & Blincow, D., with Thomas, H. (2007). Resilient Therapy: Working with children and families. London: Brunner Routledge.)

Professor Michael Ungar gives a definition of resilience as: ‘Adequate provision of health resources necessary to achieve good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development.’ (Ungar, 2005, p. 429). Professor Ungar has given a now familiar definition of the dynamic nature of the construct of resilience; that is, that it is the ability of the child or young person to navigate to, and negotiate for, support systems that are available.

Anne Rathbone from the University of Brighton reflected on this: “children and young people can’t navigate their way to support and negotiate it if they can’t see who, what and where these support systems are. Services need to be not just available, but known about, visible, timely, welcoming, and confidence-inspiring.” (See Anne Rathbone's, post for Boingboing,  Report from the European European Conference on Resilience in Education, July 2018.)

For researchers at the University of Brighton, trying to influence the conditions that shape the circumstances of children and families’ daily lives has been a core part of direct practice. Ideas for resilience-working with an inequalities imagination include:

• Resilience through consciousness-raising by working with individuals or groups in relation to the various inequalities they might face.
• Resilience through emancipatory learning, adult education and legal rights education.
• Resilience through mobilising communities, neighbourhood organisation and community development.
• Resilience through advocacy work, civic activism or advocating for others can inspire transformation.
• Resilience through negotiating, developing and using persuasion skills.
• Resilience through lobbying, campaigning and understanding the stages of policy and law-making and, thus, where to focus your effort.
• Resilience through co-production, distributing leadership, participatory action research.

This research has co-production at its core, working towards understanding Ungar’s sense of resilience as resistance. His Nine Things All Children Need, are reflective of aspects of the Resilience Framework: Structure, Consequences, Parent-child connections, lots of strong relationships, a powerful identity, a sense of control, a sense of belonging/spirituality/life purpose, rights and responsibilities, safety and support. When he talks about challenging inequalities and focusing on the most marginalised children he is talking about - and in believing in, and striving for - social change and co-production. Working with those most affected is key to this.

Done well, co-production offers, in one way or another, opportunities for all these to be developed in individuals and groups. Co-production can be viewed as embedded therapeutic practice with the iterative links between individual and community development and the power to ‘change the odds’. 

Definitions of resilience have now merged, thanks in part to successful resilience research, so that they are starting to emphasise what people can actually do to improve the odds for those having a particularly tough time of it. For the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice a working definition of resilience is, as stated above: 

"Overcoming adversity, whilst also potentially changing, or even dramatically transforming, (aspects of) that adversity." ( Uniting Resilience Research and Practice With an Inequalities Approach, Hart et al., 2016, p.3) 

Many organisations are using academic research to develop ways of working with others to help make resilient moves in their lives. Our resilience research work is part of this. In other words, "Beating the odds, whilst also changing the odds".

International communities, including here in Leandra, South Africa, have contributed to co-productive resilience research.

How resilience research is developing our understanding of what it means to be resilient 

Importantly to the  research conducted by the University of Brighton - and grounded in its years of resilience research - the meaning of resilience is not a case of individual ability. Some groups and community structures are inherently resilient while others – often in the most challenged sectors of society – require more conscious effort to build.

When we trace the history of formal research into resilience back to its roots in the 1970s, this aspect is part of what has been a controversial and developing concept. For a long time, research largely focused on individual children, in isolation from their environments and social situations, seeing resilience as a personal quality or a set of individual skills that "enable one to thrive in the face of adversity" (Connor and Davidson, 2003). The value of a concept of resilience that focuses entirely on individual traits has been challenged for seeming to support a ‘just deal with it’ attitude to poverty and deprivation (for example Garrett, 2016; de Lint and Chazel, 2013; Harrison, 2012).

While emerging research in neuroscience and genetics continues to explore biological factors (Dudley et al, 2011; Hill et al, 2015; Kim-Cohen, 2004), many researchers and theorists look beyond individual factors to a systems-based, social ecological approach to understanding resilience, recognising the ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ elements described above.

Socio-ecological models have been developed to further the understanding of the dynamic interrelations among various personal and environmental factors. The best-known social ecological theory is that of Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) and his description of the environment (or social ecology) at five different levels can be a useful tool for analysing a child’s environment and context and helps resilience researchers decide where to concentrate our efforts.

A social ecological approach to resilience will pay attention to the way a child’s environment (family, school, community and wider environment) can provide the support and resources needed for their healthy development. The University of Brighton’s Centre of Resilience for Social Justice and its social network, Boingboing, use the term ‘inequalities imagination’ to describe what is required for a practitioner to take proper account of how social, economic and health inequalities in their environment impact on child and family difficulties (Hart et al, 2003; 2016; Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky, 2005; Prilleltensky et al, 2008).

Developing an inequalities imagination will support a practice understanding of how wider social forces affect the capacities of individuals to change their own lives. Through this, the communities we work with develop a mental resilience and emotional resilience which not only helps them survive but allows them to thrive by effectively transforming the adversity they face.

Co-production and the impact of resilience research from the University of Brighton

In twenty years of international calibre research, led by Professor Angie Hart with colleagues that have included Dr Suna Eryigit-Madzwamuse, Dr Kay Aranda, Dr Josh Cameron, Dr Anne Rathbone, Professor Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Professor Phil Haynes, the University of Brighton's research made a push for social justice and the support of disadvantaged communities through resilience development.

Researchers asked: What does it take for a disadvantaged community to beat the odds that are against them and to begin to thrive? Where there are success stories, how do we ensure that others can benefit from that knowledge and improve their own lives permanently?

Research in resilience for social justice at the University of Brighton not only brought new opportunities for a better life to people both in Britain and abroad, but the co-productive model  led to systemic changes across social and education services, strengthening resilience in individuals and communities and generating projects and partnerships on a large scale.

Some of the people who made a difference through their work with the University of Brighton's research in resilience for social justice.

Social context and Resilient Therapy

Between 2008 and 2013, Resilient Therapy was applied in different settings where it was observed to bring changes not only in the young people themselves but also in the wider system, including families, schools and services. Applying a practice theory lens to Resilient Therapy evaluations, Professor Angie Hart and Dr Kay Aranda recognised that resilient moves were enacted in different ways dependent on the context of the wider environment. This observation underpinned a conceptual link between resilience and social justice and they went on to test this in new research between 2013 and 2017 within the Imagine Programme. 

The Social Context work package led by Angie Hart for the programme was a series of action research projects involving academics and community partners from Germany, Crete, Sweden, England, Wales, Scotland, Malaysia and Turkey. Working with a range of risk groups in multiple adverse contexts, it investigated ways of researching and building resilience using Resilient Therapy, at the same time drawing on the concept of Communities of Practice pioneered by Professor Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Jean Lave.

These mixed-methods approaches allowed for a co-produced contextual knowledge and understanding of complex social situations and individual experiences across groups of people. In this way, Resilient Therapy could  be researched with a range of risk groups including young people with learning difficulties, young people in institutionalised care, with child neglect history, those with mental health problems and social disadvantage, families struggling with social disadvantage, and practitioners with burnout and mental health issues. 

The work undertaken in the Imagine Programme helped forge an inclusive and robust conceptualisation of resilience that paid attention to the individual, societal, and environmental interactions simultaneously. Changes observed directly with individuals and within the systems validated the theoretical conceptualisation of resilience as, ‘overcoming adversity, whilst also potentially subtly changing, or even dramatically transforming (aspects of) that adversity.’ Individuals were empowered to take collective action with a shared interest, building capacity, knowledge, skills and relationships within the community, respecting and promoting differences, challenging power imbalances and creating opportunities for collective learning. 

Developing resilient, socially just communities

Co-production was at the heart of these findings, proving its value in producing robust insights and sustainable changes. The centre’s social enterprise network, Boingboing, was set up in 2010 with ESRC funding, and was used to propose a set of principles to guide the ways in which resilience could be fostered in disadvantaged children and young people. Advanced Resilient Therapy now situates resilience within a social-justice oriented complex system perspective aiming to optimise the socio-ecological environment of individuals. At practice level, this indicates that, for sustainable impact on young people’s health and wellbeing, interventions should: contain several interacting actions such as workforce training, targeted individual support and system change; have multiple outcomes which both increase individual protective mechanisms and reduce systemic risk factors; target and work with multiple stakeholder groups including individuals, their families, schools, and services; and be flexibly tailored to identified needs and resources. 

The University of Brighton and Boingboing promoted the adoption and adaptation of Resilient Therapy through a programme of research, practice and training. Through targeted implementation strategies that adapt approaches to user needs, organisational structures and cultural contexts the programme has produced wide-scale benefits across council and charity services, education systems and services, practitioners, and amongst communities and individuals. The engagement strategy has evolved to focus on a whole systems approach to delivering change to ensure that capacity, resources and results are maximised in a holistic manner. The Resilience Framework, which distils the book’s principles into a visual one-page grid, has facilitated use of Resilient Therapy by a wide range of services, practitioners and children or young people, including the Merseyside Youth Association and the Liverpool Child and Mental Health Services (CAMHS) who have used the framework to underpin new training programmes to cascade resilience support within schools in Liverpool.

The Academic Resilience Approach: bringing change to school systems and education services 

Derived from this process, the free, web-based Academic Resilience Approach was a Resilient Therapy derived, co-developed and designed to be user-friendly for schools. Dr Eryigit-Madzwamuse applied this system-based approach to resilience in schools in Durham, considering a social-justice-orientated whole school approach which aimed to mitigate the wellbeing and attainment differences between socially disadvantaged pupils and mainstream pupils. Using the Academic Resilience Approach, schools can self-assess and develop action plans for improving practice, structures and processes to initiate sustainable, systemic change. Web resources are also available for school staff to access ad hoc. The Academic Resilience Approach is a whole systems approach that is flexible to access and deliver, depending on a school or district’s needs and resources. Schools can either use the online resources, participate in training or request further facilitation for the implementation of the the approach in their schools. 

Over 300 individual schools across the UK received training or facilitation support on the Academic Resilience Approach from Boingboing or YoungMinds over the five years from 2016-2021. On a local authority scale the approach has been adopted and/or adapted in Blackpool, Newham and Kent through HeadStart, and in Durham, North Yorkshire, and East Sussex through County Council supported implementation. The therapy has been taken to international communities too. In Malaysia Resilient Therapy is used in psychological counselling with different risk groups. In Turkey the Academic Resilience Approach is being adopted by the Department of Education. While in Greece a project has helped to understand the complex social-emotional dynamics that are triggered in their relationships with the ‘challenging’ students and mainly with the parents, through a method that helped teachers feel lees threatened and more confident in developing alternative methods of working with those students, their parents and their colleagues.

Headstart, mental health and the beginning of the Resilience Revolution

Advising the National Lottery HeadStart Programme

Redesigning whole-systems interventions for children and young people’s services  contributed directly to the design and delivery of the UK-wide National Lottery HeadStart Programme, with £75,000,000 invested into six new partnerships. This is the largest funder of community activity in the UK and one of five long-term strategic investments in England to tackle some of society’s most entrenched social problems. Research from the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice has ensured recognition of the need for a shared language of resilience, and a whole system approach, with Angie Hart playing a key role in developing the strategy that initiated this national programme.

Blackpool’s Resilience Revolution 

In Blackpool the £11,000,000, town-wide pilot of the Resilience Revolution led by Blackpool Council, is a first in testing advanced Resilient Therapy, embedding social-justice on a whole-system scale through a focus on shared resilience language, integrated training and workforce development, and opportunities for young people to engage in practice development and strategic decision making.  

Blackpool’s pilot of the Resilience Revolution published a manifesto for community development with 18 organisations quickly signing up and confirming their commitment to work with Advanced Resilient Therapy principles in their practice. For instance, Blackpool Grand Theatre engaged in a 2-year project on Story-Led Resilient Therapy co-producing with Blackpool C/YP and the Grand Junior Artists, Blackpool’s Young Shakespeare Council changed their approach and are now co-producing their practice with children and young people.  

Across Blackpool, a shared resilience language has been developed through Resilient Therapy workshops for young people, parents and community members alongside workforce training across health, social care and early intervention services. This approach has led to systemic change in wider service design with Blackpool Council establishing new committees at the heart of Children’s Services and Education Departments. All 43 Blackpool schools have implemented the Academic Resilience Approach, with 390 pupils actively engaged in decision-making and initiatives as members of Pupil Resilient Committees in their schools. In one school for example, the Pupil Resilient Committee identified bullying as the top priority, leading to a re-launch of the anti-bullying programme, with pupils driving the work. 

Resilient Therapy has been applied in different settings, revealing that the Communities of Practice approaches helped bring changes, not only in children and young people themselves, but also in the wider support systems including families, schools and public sector services. By 2021, over 70,000 education, NHS, Social Care and Voluntary and Community Sector practitioners across a range of disciplines had received training in the Resilient Therapy (RT). It has been translated into multiple complex interventions including Blackpool’s whole town approach and the whole school approach provided by the Academic Resilience Approach. These implementations have led to significant health, public policy, service, societal and culture shift impact with long-lasting benefits locally, nationally and internationally.

Paving slabs created to build a 'resilience walkway' in Blackpool as part of the town-wide Resilience Revolution.

Social justice through resilient practices for vulnerable children and adults

The work at the University of Brighton in resilience for social justice has focused on challenging and changing unjust practices, systems and structures. Early series of action research activities worked with a range of groups facing major disadvantages. These included children and young people with learning difficulties,  care experienced young people, those with a history of child neglect and young people with mental health difficulties.

Later developments moved from research predominantly centred on children and young people to a broader range of those of facing systemic disadvantage as well. This includes, but is not limited to, supporting the mental health and resilience of adults in recovery, ex-offenders, practitioners, adults with learning disabilities and more. Through the Resilience Revolution, researchers have also learnt that activism has the power to build resilience and boost mental wellbeing, and this is reflected in the range of research projects that have engaged with Activism for Resilience. 

The University of Brighton's researchers recognised research as a community practice, co-producing knowledge and understanding of highly complex social situations and individual experiences by drawing on the widest possible range of perspectives, including academics, social workers, teachers, experts-through-experience and service users.

The team proved themselves leaders in the academic development of resilience research – a refining and understanding of what resilience is and the publishing of material that demonstrates how it can be part of more people’s lives. More than this though, the research included responsibility for the dissemination of methods and models of resilience which bring an increasing possibility of social justice to communities worldwide.

Putting themselves at the heart of the Resilience Revolution, resilience research at the University of Brighton put a robust scholarship together with tireless commitment on the part of a group of staff who worked at the university in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Researchers continue to refine and develop core areas of research based on the ever popular Resilience Framework as well as the thriving Academic Resilience Approach, demonstrating how people from very different backgrounds bring about better and more resilient collective futures. 

Resilience Revolution drawing workshop, Blackpool.