Family Resilience in Multiple Contexts

Key Words: chronic illness, gay and lesbian families, poverty, relationship maintenance, resilience, rural families. INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL SECTION We may be entering the Age of Resilience. Although resilience has been studied for well over 2 decades, the growing interest in the concept of resilience exhibited during the waning years of the 20th century was accelerated dramatically on September 11, 2001. Since then, references to individual, family, and community resilience have been plentiful in newspapers and periodicals around the world. In The New York Times alone, over 100 articles contained a reference to resilience in the 3 months following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. It would not be surprising if social and behavioral scientists show increasing interest in the phenomenon of "doing well in the face of adversity." The question raised by Joan Patterson (this issue), "What accounts for why some stay healthy and do well in the face of risk and adversity and others do not?" has taken on extraordinary importance not just in the United States but around the world. This Special Collection of articles focuses on relationship and family resilience. In our view, attention has far too often centered on problems and difficulties in families. Although there has been a long history of research on families coping with stresses and hardships, this work often has not been framed explicitly from a resilience perspective. These articles reflect an effort to move family resilience research forward. In this Special Collection of articles on individual, relational, and family resilience, the authors not only examine prior research on resilience but they also set forth a number of directions for future research. Just as important, they raise critical issues for family researchers: (a) What is resilience? Is it a characteristic, a process, or an outcome? (b) When is family resilience manifested? Is resilience a phenomenon that must be accompanied by unusually difficult circumstances (i.e., significant risks) or can resilience be observed as individuals and families encounter normative or everyday challenges? (c) Is resilience only experienced by individuals or is there such a thing as family or relational resilience? Joan Patterson systematically approaches these questions as she integrates a resilience framework for family research with previous models of family stress and coping. She presents a brief history of how family scholars have conceptualized stress, coping, and positive adaptation, and she compares how family practitioners and family researchers have viewed resilience. Using her own research on families coping with adversities related to chronic illness as examples, Patterson's article sets a course for research programs of family resilience to follow. Rand and Kathi Conger present one such research program in the review of the Iowa Project. The Congers examine findings derived from an ongoing longitudinal investigation of Midwestern farm families. The Iowa project researchers conceptualize resilience as a process by which individuals, relationships, and families adapt to contexts of significant adversity. One context examined in this article is economic hardship; the Family Stress Model of Economic Hardship developed by Conger and colleagues is a conceptual framework that is clearly applicable to other types of family stresses. As the Congers report here, this model can account for multiple sources of adversity that affect different family members in disparate ways. The Iowa Project also has shown that outcomes of resilience processes are diverse and that positive adaptation may occur on either individual or relational levels. The other type of adversity reviewed in the Congers' article is the normative developmental transition from adolescence to young adulthood. This program of research makes a special contribution because, as Patterson (this issue) points out, family researchers generally have not studied resilience in the face of normative stressors such as life course tasks. …