Introduction

Chapter 1 introduces the conceptualization of resilience to elucidate the value of developing resilience. The conceptualization covers resilience as a process constituted by exposure, belief, action, and feeling regarding resilience, with the feeling marking the core state of resilience. Essentially, resilience means adjustment under adversity to indicate rebounding, recovering, or restoring to maintain normal living or functioning. As a primal concern of analytical functionalism, functioning necessitates the four functions of fulfillment, adaptation, integration, and latency. Four currencies are leveraged in functionalist mechanisms to achieve functions, power, utility, ideals, and norms. These mechanisms are integral to the analytical-functionalist framework for examining the development of resilience by various personal and societal conditions. These conditions include contextual, sociodemographic, peer, practice, social capital, and developmental. Their examination involved six datasets of 6948 cases surveyed in Chinese societies. Remarkably, the examination revealed the positive effects of societal caring, kindness, social capital, and ritualistic activity on resilience. Conversely, the examination found the inverse effects of societal exclusion, adversity, and peer adversity on resilience.