Developmental Conditions for Resilience

This chapter additionally focuses on a survey of 3564 junior secondary school pupils in the Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou to clarify the impacts of developmental conditions on resilience. Such conditions include individual sports, collective sports, sports coaching, adventuring, volunteering, religious activity, carnival activity, musical activity, and ritualistic and nation-related activity. They contribute to resilience through the voluntaristic mechanism of power realization, following empowerment through individual or collective activity. Such power includes physical, spiritual, and social ones buttressed by religion and the nation, reflecting coaching and nurturing generally. They provide disciplining, training, and support to confront difficulties to develop resilience. As such, the developmental effect of such practices starts with social or collective empowerment, notably involving rituals. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such practices hinges on their fostering of voluntarism or self-determination to raise personal power to realize the voluntaristic mechanism. The fostering, in turn, benefits from the assimilation of social norms according to the voluntaristic mechanism of norm conformity. As such, ritualistic activity can inculcate the religious and national norms of resilience. Furthermore, nation-related activity is more normative and empowering for resilience in Guangzhou than in Macau and Hong Kong.