Rural change and the ability of farming communities to respond and withstand change is a topic of ongoing concern in the current research agenda. ‘Rural community resilience’ is a concept that has become a core theme of academic, policy and lay discourses discussing dynamics of rural change, widely associated with community studies and allied to notions of social capital. This work reviews approaches to community relations developed within community studies and social capital scholarship, and suggests that the relational agency of the network ties might also be explored through the application of an assemblage approach. However, and unlike many previous approaches to community resilience that use the concept in a normative way and which understandably highlight agency of social relations, this research has been constructed in such a way that network ties established through day-to-day community practices are characterized both vital and far from passive. Developing this current line of thinking in rural studies, this project argues that more-than-social agency evoked by relations between human and non-human components of the rural assemblage is an important factor affecting community resilience. The empirical research feeds from two case studies and gathers evidence from two distinctive agricultural communities of Hungary and Wales, whilst also recognizing similarities in the context of globalization. It argues that rural community resilience lies in relations between the humans, the land and the agricultural commodities.

The scientific and socio-political dimensions of volcanic hazards have been realigned since the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and have highlighted the need for volcanic activity to be studied from interdisciplinary perspectives. By focussing on communication, adaptability and resilience, this research explains the links between hazard management and social constructivism. The research question asks how Iceland’s networked approach to managing volcanoes can be understood by analysing the development of communication channels between human stakeholders and non-human technical devices and systems. Fieldwork was conducted in both Iceland and the UK, and a mixed methods approach was used to engage with the network. Research methods consisted of semi-structured interviews, participant observations and archival research. Findings explain the evolution of knowledge exchange, the value of technical innovation, and the need for interactions between local, national and international stakeholders. The study concludes that actors are increasingly empowered by the use of participatory technologies within hazard management, and the development of collaborative engagements between stakeholder communities from scientific and socio-political backgrounds. This research is relevant as it illustrates how the adaptive capacity of hazard networks can be expanded, potentially influencing the approaches that are taken to manage volcanic hazards in less economically developed contexts. In addition, this study can encourage continued interaction between scientists, at-risk communities and the aviation industry in multi-hazard environments such as Iceland.

The overall purpose of the present study is to contribute to a better understanding of the experiences of young homeless women residing at Covenant House New York, a youth shelter that provides crisis and long-term residential programs to young adults ages 18 – 21. The main objective was to identify past life events and their contributions to the development of positive traits and psychopathology among three groups. The participants were 162 homeless young women, including childfree women, young mothers enrolled at a transitional living Rights of Passage program (12-18 months), and young mothers in crisis enrolled in a 30-day Mother and Child Crisis program. Past life experiences were identified via the Effort to Outcome (ETO) online software database maintained by Covenant House New York. Rates of psychopathology were measured using the IIP (interpersonal problems), PHQ-9 (depression), GAD-7 (anxiety), PSS (parental stress) while rates of positive traits were measured using the SCS (self-compassion), SCBCS (compassion toward others), and PGIS (motivation to change). The results indicated that all participants, regardless of group affiliation, had similar life experiences, though childfree women were more likely to have a history of abandonment, physical abuse, and previous incidents of homelessness. Additionally, presence of abuse history was positively associated with development of psychopathology. As expected, history of sexual abuse was negatively associated with self-compassion, but it was positively associated with compassion toward others. Mothers at the Mother and Child Crisis program had greater rates of self-compassion than mothers at the Rights of Passage program, and childfree women were more likely than the mothers to be compassionate toward others. Mothers at the Mother and Child Crisis program were also more likely to be compassionate toward others than mothers at the Rights of Passage program. Childfree women, however, were more likely to be depressed than mothers at the Mother and Child Crisis program.

In three parts, this dissertation seeks to clarify constructs used in contemporary and emerging models of child resilience, examine the predictive capacity of these models, and delineate key steps towards improving and refining models useful to mental health and psychosocial support program and policy initiatives in humanitarian settings. Data collected for this research was part of an inter-agency evaluation of Child Friendly Spaces in Nepal following the 2015 earthquake. Findings from these studies call for future research directed towards the development of more rigorous and equitable indicators used to evaluate mental health and psychosocial support programs that allow for a longer tracing of healthy developmental trajectories for children affected by situations of extreme adversity.

Cognitive processes have been shown to be severely affected by exposure to combat and war. While the negative impact of war on cognitive performance is apparent through numerous soldier narratives, the scientific investigation of this phenomenon is limited. Furthermore, the moderating influence of an individual’s resilience and grit on cognitive functions following combat environments is unknown. Understanding this interaction is essential in further understanding individual cognitive performance. Because the psychological wounds inflicted by combat situations affect individuals’ mental health, studying how such environments influence cognitive processes and performance can improve the training of our soldiers. This dissertation focuses on assessing how combat-like environments influence an individual’s ability to effectively and efficiently reason, and further examines whether an individual’s grit and resilience affect deductive and inductive reasoning in stressful environments. Participants were recruited from a private US military academy. The study used a pretest-posttest mixed design to investigate possible cognitive decrements in individuals’ ability to reason following exposure to war-like environments simulated by immersive and non-immersive technologies. Dependent measures included both inductive and deductive reasoning (as measured by The Letter Sets Test and Overton’s (1990) version of the Wason Selection Task, respectively) by placing participants into the immersive or non-immersive conditions. Self-reported resilience and grit were tested for interaction effects to examine how an individual’s resilience and grit influences an individual’s ability to reason in war-like environments. These findings might give a richer understanding of the ways in which cognitive mechanisms are affected by stressful environments like combat.

Increases in the number of enlisted veterans transitioning from active duty to the civilian world have drawn attention to a need for research in terms of unemployment to examine how separated service members experience transition from their perspective. Fifteen separated enlisted veterans from four of the five military branches were selected and interviewed in this study. The focus was to understand better the complexities of reintegrating into the civilian workforce, as experienced by veterans from the enlisted military population. By using qualitative methodologies including exploratory interviews and a focus group, the findings revealed four major themes on how service members described their transition experience: (a) perception that military leadership does not provide adequate support when transitioning and the need to become more self-directed in one’s own learning; (b) belief that the military TAP class is helpful but needs major changes to truly be effective; (c) description of a battle buddy or a family member as a positive influence in helping with the transition process; and (d) experiencing significant challenges with civilian employers when transitioning out of the military. An analysis of the findings led the researcher to conclude that transitioning veterans must become self-directed in their learning in order to transition successfully. Moreover, because they are at varying levels of being self-directed when they transition, additional guidance is needed from military leadership, family, and other veterans for the purpose of their development. The analysis also yielded a principal recommendation for military leadership to advocate for quality training programs that are specified from the separated enlisted population for what resources they need to assist with transition to the civilian sector. Additional recommendations were presented to transitioning service members on the importance of managing their own success and believing in their abilities to be resilient, valuable members of the civilian community.

Resilience is the process by which protective factors enable a child to achieve desirable outcomes despite the presence of adversity in their lives. It develops through the child's interaction with their ecosystem; their family, school and wider community. A resilient child has internal resources, external supports and the interpersonal skills required facilitate this interdependency. Narrative theory suggests that when a child's prevalent narratives focus on protective factors rather than risk factors this will form a resilient self-identity. This thesis combines resilience literature and narrative theory by exploring the process of developing children's resilience through enhancing and creating protective focussed stories through narrative therapy. The narrative methodology Narrative Oriented Inquiry (NOI), (Hiles and Cermak, 2008) is used to gather and then explore the stories told by three children, their parents and their teachers. The children who had been identified by their teachers as needing to become more resilient were engaged in a short series of narrative therapy sessions with the aim of changing the nature of the stories they held about themselves from stories based on risk factors to those based on protective factors. The process was further supported through inviting the child's parent and teacher into the therapeutic sessions. This thesis makes a unique contribution by exploring how children's resilience can be promoted through use of narrative therapy in professional practice. The implications for educational psychology practice and resilience research are discussed. A number of limitations to the research design and so the conclusions made are discussed, these primarily focus on the unknown impact of the narrative therapy on the children's behaviour beyond the sessions and the complex nature of the dual researcher/practitioner role. The thesis explores the efficacy of NOI for research of this type. The processes NOI offers allow 'the told', 'the teller' and 'the telling' to inform a deep understanding of the stories shared. Interpreting the stories through the six interpretative lenses offered by NOI enabled the researcher to compare the stories told by each participant and to compare the stories told by different participants before and after the narrative therapy. The thesis offers suggestions for further development of the advice around its use and discusses the contribution NOI could make to educational psychology practice.

This thesis explores the question of how social power is accounted for in the theory and practice of resilience. Beginning with a critical assessment of the social ecological systems (SES) perspective that underpins much of the theory and study of resilience, this thesis develops a framework, based on Gaventa’s powercube, for understanding power that also incorporates a much less hierarchical understanding of the dimensions of space and time. This revised ‘powerplane’ framework is applied to two empirical case studies of practices of resilience. Applying the powerplane to the case of government-led Scottish community emergency resilience planning finds that while the practices of resilience result in greater levels of engagement and interaction between local and regional levels of government, a gap exists between local government and the public it represents. Applying the powerplane to the grassroots case of Transition Town Peterborough, Canada, shows that intimate knowledge of local social and political institutions can allow a grassroots organisation to introduce resilience ideas into social and political community life. Together the two case studies reveal three key insights from resilience practices aimed at local contexts, rooted in: (1) institutionalising community engagement practices; (2) differences between formal and informal understandings of resilience; and (3) the scope of the risks resilience is aimed at mitigating. Critically exploring these issues in turn helps to illuminate questions about the efficacy, as well as the social and political implications of the resilience practice in question. For theory, the research shows that reconsidering hierarchical notions of scale and time in SES resilience can provoke new thinking about the role of power in resilience practices. In doing so, insights from this research offer novel challenges and complementarities to they way existing critiques of resilience approaches to account for social power issues.

Les enjeux économiques, sociaux et démographiques liés à l’emploi des seniors deviennent de plus en plus importants. Pourtant le taux d’emploi des seniors en France reste l’un des plus faibles en Europe. Face à la complexification et au durcissement de l’environnement économique, les structures organisationnelles ont été profondément modifiées, avec réduction des niveaux hiérarchiques, nouvelles formes de travail, de mobilités, offrant aux cadres de nouvelles formes de carrières, alternatives à la progression hiérarchique classique, verticale et intra organisationnelle. Lors des dernières décennies la population des cadres a connu des changements profonds. Dans leur dernière partie de carrière il apparait que les cadres seniors soient en situation d’attente bien souvent subie. Il semble alors intéressant de se pencher sur cette attente et d’en analyser les composantes. L’objet de cette recherche est de définir plus précisément cette notion d’attente professionnelle de fin de carrière et d’en analyser ses conséquences en termes de résilience individuelle. Le terme de résilience pourra surprendre à la première lecture. Il n’est pas encore véritablement diffusé en France dans le vocabulaire du management. De nombreux auteurs et praticiens (souvent psychiatres ou pédopsychiatres) ont contribué à faire connaître ce concept et à développer ses contours théoriques autant que le champ de ses applications pratiques. L’enjeu de cette recherche est de de comprendre l’attente de fin de carrière des cadres seniors et de confirmer la présence de la résilience individuelle positive et négative mais surtout l’existence ou non de la résilience individuelle calculée qui n’existe pas dans la littérature. / The economic, social and demographic challenges related to the employment of seniors are becoming more and more important. However the employment rate of seniors in France remains one of the lowest in Europe. Faced with the complexity and hardening of the economic environment, the organizational structures have been profoundly changed: flattening of hierarchies, new forms of work and of mobilities, providing executives with new forms of careers, alternatives to the traditional hierarchical progression that is vertical and intra organizational. In recent decades, executives have undergone profound changes. In their final game of career it seems that senior executives are in situation of expectation, most often undergone. It thus seems interesting to examine this expectation and to analyze its components. The purpose of this research is to define more precisely this notion of professional expectation at the end of career and to analyze its consequences in terms of individual resilience. The term resilience may surprise on the first reading. It is not yet fully released in France in the management vocabulary. Numerous authors and practitioners (often psychiatrists or child psychiatrists) have contributed to make this concept known and to develop its theoretical outlines as well as the scope of its practical applications. The aim of this research is to understand the expectation of the senior executives at the end of career and to confirm the presence of positive and negative individual resilience, and especially the existence or absence of the calculated individual resilience, which does not exist in the literature.

For failure experiences to be productive for future performance or learning, students must be both willing to persist in the face of failure, and effective in gleaning information from their errors. While there have been extensive advances in understanding the motivational dispositions that drive resilience and persistence in the face of failure, less has been done to investigate what strategies and learning behaviors students can undertake to make those failure experiences productive. This dissertation investigates what kinds of behaviors expert learners (in the form of graduate students) employ when encountering failure that predict future performance (Study 1), and whether such effective behaviors can be provoked in less sophisticated learners (in the form of high school students) that would subsequently lead to deeper learning (Study 2). Study 1 showed that experiencing and responding to failures in an educational electrical circuit puzzle game prior to formal instruction led to deeper learning, and that one particular strategy, “information-seeking and fixing”, was predictive of higher performance. This strategy was decomposed into three metacognitive components: error specification, where the subject made the realization that a knowledge gap or misunderstanding led to the failure; knowledge gap resolution, where the subject sought information to resolve the knowledge gap; and application, where subjects took their newly acquired information to fix their prior error. In Study 2, two types of prompts were added to the educational game: one that provoked students through these metacognitive steps of error specification, information seeking, and fixing, labelled the “Metacognitive Failure Response” (MFR) condition; and a second prompt that provoked students to make a global judgment of knowing, labelled the “Global Awareness” (GA) condition. The results indicated that although there were no significant condition differences between the three groups (MFR, GA, and control condition where participants received no prompt at all), more time spent on the MFR prompt predicted deeper and more robust learning. In contrast, more time spent on the “Global Awareness” prompt did not predict deeper learning, suggesting that individual factors (such as conscientiousness) did not alone account for the benefits of time spent on the MFR prompt on learning. These results suggest that while MFR participants who carefully attended to the metacognitive prompts to specify the source of their errors and seek information experienced learning benefits, not all MFR participants sufficiently attended to the prompts enough to experience learning gains. Altogether, this body of research suggests that using this “error specification, info-seeking, fixing” strategy can be effective for making failure productive, but other instructional techniques beyond system-delivered prompts must be employed for full adoption of this metacognitive response to failure. Implications for teaching students to respond effectively to failure, for games in the classroom, and for design and engineering processes are discussed.