Journal of Family Social Work

ISSN: 1052-2158 (Print) 1540-4072 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wfsw20

Family resilience: Emerging trends in theory and

practice

Kristin Hadfield & Michael Ungar

To cite this article: Kristin Hadfield & Michael Ungar (2018) Family resilience: Emerging
trends in theory and practice, Journal of Family Social Work, 21:2, 81-84, DOI:
10.1080/10522158.2018.1424426

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10522158.2018.1424426

Published online: 06 Apr 2018.

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JOURNAL OF FAMILY SOCIAL WORK
2018, VOL. 21, NO. 2, 81–84
https://doi.org/10.1080/10522158.2018.1424426

PREFACE

Family resilience: Emerging trends in theory and practice

Kristin Hadfielda and Michael Ungarb
a
Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK;
b
Resilience Research Centre, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
KEYWORDS Family resilience; resilience; family systems; adversity; family functioning

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 28 December 2017; Accepted 03 January 2018

Thinking systemically has always been important to how social workers

approach problems and their solutions. The field of resilience, and in particular
the study of human resilience, however, was initially led largely by psychologists
who focused on individual traits and patterns of invulnerability or coping to
explain better-than-expected developmental outcomes of children living in
stressful environments (e.g., Anthony, 1987; Murphy & Moriarty, 1976). The
systems surrounding the child and the family were mentioned, but the focus
remained largely on an individual child’s capacity to cope rather than the
available strengths in a child’s family, peer, school, or community contexts.
A shift to a more systemic focus to studies of positive functioning and
resilience began in earnest during the 1980s with the important work of
Dr. Froma Walsh (1998, 2003; who appears in this special issue) and her
focus on patterns of adaptation in families. Other researchers, such as
Dr. Hamilton McCubbin and his group, were studying the resilience of
military families and racial minority families (McCubbin et al., 1998;
McCubbin & Patterson, 1983) around the same time, noticing that it takes a
well-functioning family system, not just individuals, to cope in a stressful
environment. Models of family coping (and resilience), along with shifting
discourses in the field of psychology toward a more contextualized science of
human development, began to influence the pioneers of resilience theory,
including Sir Michael Rutter (1985), Dr. Norman Garmezy and his student
Dr. Ann Masten (Garmezy, 1983; Garmezy, Masten, & Tellegen, 1984), and
Drs. Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith (1982). They and many others began to
observe the positive impact of attachments and the opportunities that prox-
imal (family) and distal (community) systems provided vulnerable populations
of children. The result has been the broadening of our understanding of the
mechanisms that create resilience, with the resilience of family processes now
known to improve the resilience of individuals biologically (Sternthal et al.,
2009), psychologically (Cicchetti, 2013), and socially (Ungar, 2015, 2016).

CONTACT Kristin Hadfield k.hadfield@qmul.ac.uk Fogg Building, Department of Biological and

Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, E1 4NS.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
82 K. HADFIELD AND M. UNGAR

Although we know family systems matter when it comes to resilience, there is

still much to learn about how families influence the resilience of their members
and how we (as social workers and other health professionals) can intervene to
improve the resilience of populations who are marginalized by personal
limitations and social and structural barriers.
This special issue of the Journal of Family Social Work on family resilience
explores some emerging trends in a systemic approach to resilience, drawing
attention to new understandings of how family systems impact child and adult
well-being in contexts of adversity. We begin this issue with an interview
between the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Social Work, Dr. Judith
Siegel, and one of the leading experts on family resilience, Dr. Froma Walsh. In
this fascinating interview, Dr. Walsh describes how her own experiences led
her to a family resilience perspective, how a strengths-based approach can be
useful when working with families, and changes she has seen in this field
throughout her career.
We have then included two articles that are focused on how individuals and
families cope with displacement and adversity resulting from major challenges
outside of the family. In the first, through interviews with Syrian refugees and
social workers in a European country which receives few refugees, Dubus (this
issue) explains what family and societal processes are critical to well-being
among refugees. She contrasts how differences in two families’ predisplacement
lives influence how they deal with the resettlement process. Given the scale of
displacement worldwide, this in-depth exploration into how and which pre- and
postsettlement factors influence family resilience has important practical impli-
cations for social workers. The second article is a theoretical and review piece on
how natural disasters impact individuals and families. Osofsky and Osofsky (this
issue) explain how building resilience at the individual, family, and community
level is necessary for reducing the negative effects of major disasters. Using a case
study as an example, they provide specific points to help social workers and
other professionals to work effectively with students in schools after disasters in
ways which promote students’ resilience, as well as emphasizing the lessons they
have learned through doing this work.
Finally, we have included three articles that focus more specifically on family
and couple functioning. These articles take different approaches, with the first
two focusing on building protective processes to improve relationships, and the
final paper discussing how a one-size-fits-all approach to families may be coun-
ter-productive. Jensen and Bowen (this issue) use survey data from over 30,000
active-duty Air Force members in the United States to test a model of how
resilience can be bolstered. They aim to understand how maltreatment within
families can be reduced by improving how Air Force members deal with adver-
sity. Their findings suggest the critical importance of safe, stable, and nurturing
families in promoting resilience and reducing family maltreatment perpetration.
Following this, Lucier-Greer, Birney, Gutierrez, and Adler-Baeder’s (this issue)
 JOURNAL OF FAMILY SOCIAL WORK 83

article describes the development and testing of a mobile app, Love Every Day,
which enhances relationship quality, skills, and behaviours. The possibility of
using a mobile application to promote daily positive interactions between families
has great potential for improving couple relationships and bolstering the resi-
lience of all couples but may be of particular use for those who are unable to
benefit from in-person interventions because of geographic or social issues.
Finally, Hadfield, Ungar, and Nixon (this issue) examine “family instability,”
which is a concept often used in research and practice to describe when a parent
dissolves or enters into a romantic relationship. In their article, Hadfield and
colleagues use case examples from interviews with mothers and their children in
Ireland to exemplify ways in which these transitions in family structure may be
positive or negative, and provide advice for how parents can manage these
transitions to avoid causing stress to their children.
Together these articles continue a four-decade conversation about family
resilience and the important role social workers play in advancing our
understanding of how the resilience of systems can improve the resilience
of individuals. The articles give a sense of the diversity of research done in
the field of family resilience and its application to social work practice.

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