Psychological Resilience Following Disasters: A Study of Adolescents and Their Caregivers

Resilience, the process of successful adaptation to adverse circumstances, is traditionally studied as an individual characteristic. However, more recent multisystem perspectives underline the interrelatedness of systems, within and outside of the individual, in shaping coping and adaptation processes. This challenges the assumption that pathways to resilience are the same across the world, given the diversity in people’s contexts globally. In light of the preponderance of resilience research being conducted in higher-income countries, this study taps pathways to resilience in survivors of the 2018 earthquake-tsunami-liquefaction disaster in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Guided by a social representations approach and using a novel free association technique, forty caregiver-adolescent dyads (N = 80) who survived the disaster were interviewed regarding their subjective experiences of coping and adaptation. Thematic analysis of their narratives demonstrated that survivors focused on mutual support, religious beliefs and intrapersonal psychological resources of seeking strength and calmness as routes for fostering psychological recovery. The results foreground group-specific aspects of such resilience: differences between caregivers and adolescents highlight how social roles and life stage shape resilience-related beliefs and practices. Moreover, the form their resilience takes is underpinned by sociocultural values of reciprocity and social cohesion. Thus, this paper points to similarities in resilience processes across contexts, but also to differences shaped by societal roles, developmental stage and cultural values.