Practical Bases for Resilience

This chapter examines the voluntaristic basis for resilience, emphasizing personal and peer practices, including experience-based coping, socializing, engaging with pets, religious practice, hardening, and softening. Hardening means forceful, confronting, proactive practice, whereas softening means acting tenderly, compromising, and withdrawing. The aggregates (averages) of personal practices in the service unit identify peer or contextual practices. Besides these personal and peer practice factors, advice received and Westernization represent social deterministic factors. Analysis of survey data on elders exhibited that experience-based coping, hardening, and softening significantly sustained resilience. Meanwhile, functional disability significantly impeded resilience. These impacts represent the voluntaristic mechanism of power realization, goal attainment, or transforming resources, capabilities, and/or efforts in production. The impacts also reflect the voluntaristic mechanism of ideal consistency, such that the practices are consonant with resilience. By contrast, advice received, and Westernization could have consistently delivered significant effects on resilience. This nonsignificance does not bolster the deterministic mechanism. Hence, the voluntaristic mechanism outperforms the deterministic mechanism in developing resilience. Nevertheless, socializing, religious practice, and pet engagement did not indicate significant effects on resilience. These practices are thus inconsistent with and/or incapable of generating resilience concerning the voluntaristic mechanisms of ideal consistency and power realization. In addition, some interactions between personal and peer practice manifested significant effects on resilience. For instance, resilience was higher when peer advice was higher despite higher personal adversity. This differential indicates the effectiveness due to sharing peer advice among peers. Additionally, this reflects the deterministic mechanism of empowering, particularly in the case of powerlessness due to adversity. Furthermore, Westernization did not affect the effects of the personal and social factors on resilience, thus showing that the effects are stable across Westernized and non-Westernized people. The findings are thus likely not specific to Hong Kong Chinese people.