Personal Background Bases for the Resilience Process

This Chapter displays a fundamental attempt to address feasibility and reasonableness in developing resilience based on the person’s background characteristics. Background characteristics include personal, sociodemographic, and socioeconomic characteristics such as a person’s age, gender, education, birthplace, and residency. Concerning the analytical-functionalist framework, background characteristics are influential through their functions for the voluntaristic mechanisms of power realization, utility optimization, norm conformity, and ideal consistency. Resilience processes comprise feeling, action, belief, learning, and demand received about resilience. Analysis of poverty survey data on the public revealed that age was the only significant background characteristic eroding resilience. Meanwhile, analysis of violence survey data on the public showed that marriage was the only significant background characteristic buttressing resilience. In this connection, the effect of age was positive but not significant. Analysis of survey data on social service users revealed that age, earnings, and living with parents significantly upheld resilience. Meanwhile, family size significantly diminished resilience. Moreover, age, education, and living with offspring significantly positively affected action for resilience. Living with the spouse, parents, and private housing significantly positively affected learning resilience. Similarly, age, female gender, education, living with siblings, and living with parents positively impacted belief about resilience. By contrast, age significantly negatively affected the demand received for resilience. Nevertheless, analysis of survey data on elders showed that no background characteristic had a significant effect on resilience. In addition, analysis of survey data on people with visual impairment indicated that family income per capita, social welfare, and having a birthplace in Hong Kong significantly positively affected resilience. By contrast, visual impairment severity, visual impairment duration, education, being an employee, being self-employed, being unemployed, and living in rental public housing significantly negatively affected resilience. Hence, the person’s age, education, marriage, earnings, living with parents, family income, and even reception of social welfare tend to prop resilience. As these characteristics represent human, financial, and social resources, their contributions to resilience embody the power realization mechanism. The contributions testify to the feasibility and reasonableness because the characteristics are more inherent and accessible to the person. That is, no external force appears to inhibit or displace the contributions. Hence, resilience evolves from the voluntaristic use of personal background characteristics, which, for instance, provides power or resources to sustain the process of resilience. That is, static power is necessary for the dynamics of action.