ABSTRACT

To counter a growing sense of the fragile nature of human existence within Western society, a number of stratagems have been proposed as means of increasing resilience among those who are deemed to lack it. In addition to the use of resilience within many academic fields – ranging from psychology to ecology, political theory, and engineering – resilience has become a part of everyday discourse, being used to describe everything from sports teams that overcome various setbacks to the purported effect of various self-help treatments. Amidst the variety of definitions of the construct, resilience in human beings is generally seen to include three core components: the experience of significant risk or adversity, the utilisation of resources to cope amidst adversity, and a positive outcome. Protective and promotive factors have been dubbed ‘the defining attributes of resilience’. Conceptions of resilience are contextually dependent and influenced by environmental considerations.