Social Capital Bases for Resilience

This chapter attempts to elaborate on the social, deterministic influence on resilience. Accordingly, the social factors concerned are social capital and empowerment. Social capital arises from two sources, associations (e.g., parental associations) and friends, which comprises structural (i.e., relational), functional (e.g., aid), and substantive or resource (e.g., wealth) forms in the sources. In addition, extraversion is a personal factor in registering the voluntaristic mechanism of power realization. Analysis of survey data on people with visual disabilities revealed that associational social capital, friend structural social capital, friend functional social capital, and friend social capital integrated significantly sustained resilience. This sustenance demonstrates the deterministic mechanism of empowering. However, empowerment did not significantly elevate resilience, thus tempering support for the deterministic mechanism of empowering. By contrast, friend substantive social capital significantly negatively affected resilience. This effect reveals the deterministic mechanism of incentivizing, such that friends’ resources devalue and discourage the personal development of resilience. In addition, extraversion displayed a significant positive effect on resilience. This effect reflects the voluntaristic mechanism of power realization. Overall, social or deterministic factors, as well as the personal factor of extraversion, influence resilience. Deterministic factors do not replace personal factors, which maintain their unique contributions.