Exploring Resilience with Families: Overview report
Authors: Daly Mary 
Published: February 2024

This report provides an overview analysis of the findings of the empirical research conducted for Work Package 4 of the rEUsilience project. Forty-one focus groups were held in the first six months of 2023 with different types of families in the six countries covered by the project: Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The research goal was to find out the risks that families face, how they cope in circumstances of low resources and what resources they need to avoid negative outcomes. The analysis focused on cross-national patterns especially. The results indicate major intra- and cross-national similarities in the living situation of participants, with inadequacies in income, time and money characterising many participants’ everyday life, sometimes leading to compounded hardship and adversity. Another striking set of findings across countries was of how much effort the participants had to put in to manage their situation. Dealing with employment, the benefit system, the health system or the social service system can be hugely time consuming. A wide range of cognitive skills and behaviours were on display. A strong conclusion across the countries was of how participants struggled to get help from the systems that are supposed to help them. The role of non-governmental organisations were very important, especially in Belgium, Spain, and the UK. The meaning and significance of family was revealed again and again by the narratives although there were differences in the extent to which people felt they could call on their families to help. Family help was most mentioned in Croatia, Poland and Spain. Notwithstanding these and other variations, there were significant numbers of participants in all of the countries who did not have a secure network of support. Overall the results conveyed a strong sense of people trying to manage in a situation where help and support from others could not be counted on.As a general pattern, the Swedish participants were least likely to report problems with the institutional support architecture or the quality of paid work. Such constraints were much more widespread and ‘normal’ in the other five countries. In particular, the costs of childcare and service availability were identified as a major problem in Belgium, Croatia, Poland and the UK. Moreover, the experiences of the Polish and Spanish participants indicate that the labour market that they engage with was highly informal and under-regulated, leaving them in jobs with low pay, variable hours or work, un- or ill-defined tasks and few if any social rights and entitlements. The situation of migrants stood out as being more difficult in all countries. Taken as a whole, the findings underlined the complexity and variety of responses needed by people to cope and indicated that, especially in the context of rising costs of living, people were using (up) existing resources rather than increasing their pool of resources. Coping by absorbing loss or greater demand is a short-term strategy that may well decrease the capacity to be resilient in the long term. In addition, many people’s situation was embedded in a longer-term trajectory of resource scarcities and deprivations accumulating over time. It is the weaknesses in long-term income generating capacity that were predominant as against sudden ‘shocks’. On the basis of the evidence produced by the research, countries need to certainly ensure against sudden shocks but they also need to address ongoing risks and vulnerability.