Peer Influences on the Resilience Process

This Chapter exhibits a further attempt to gauge the social, deterministic, and personal, voluntaristic development of resilience processes. Such processes comprise the voluntaristic formation of resilience, including its action, learning, belief, and resilience demand received successively. Moreover, the related behavior, belief, and character include self-awareness, compensation, benevolent world belief, and kindness. Reflective of deterministic development are other social factors, including aid received and the sociability and kindness of other people. These factors notably included those aggregated for peers in the service unit. According to the vision of the resilience process, resilience evolves from factors progressively emerging at different points. Analysis of survey data on social service users showed that kindness, the sociability and kindness of other people, and aid received, apart from background characteristics, were the earliest contributors to resilience and its resilience, learning, and belief. Furthermore, beliefs about resilience and a benevolent world were earlier significant contributors to resilience, resilience action, and resilience learning. In addition, resilience action, learning resilience, self-awareness, and compensation later contributed to resilience. However, the demand for resilience manifested adverse effects on resilience, resilience action, resilience learning, and resilience belief. Thus, the process of resilience from learning and belief about resilience to action and feeling about resilience successively was demonstrable. This process reflects the voluntaristic mechanism of ideal consistency in the analytical-functionalist framework. Similarly, the contributions of other behaviors, beliefs, and dispositions illustrate the same voluntaristic mechanism. By contrast, the impacts of social factors on individual resilience represent the deterministic mechanisms, which focus on the suprapersonal or group determinants of the analytical-functionalist framework. For instance, a significant peer influence was the positive effect of peers’ disabilities on resilience. This effect indicates that individual resilience was higher than poorer peers’ condition. Such contrast reflects the deterministic mechanism of incentivizing to show one’s distinctiveness from others. Hence, the deterministic basis for developing the resilience process is evident. Nevertheless, the deterministic basis is unlikely to override the voluntaristic process. Resilience and its process are feasible and reasonable because of their voluntaristic basis.