Resilience In Narratives Research Articles

Communicated Resilience in Mothers’ Narratives about the Diagnosis and Birth of Their Child with Down Syndrome

ABSTRACT Down syndrome (DS) is the most prevalent chromosomal condition, affecting one in every 733 babies born annually in the United States . Grounded in the communication theory of resilience (CTR;), the present analysis was conducted to evaluate mothers’ communicated resilience in narratives about the birth and diagnosis of their child with DS. In so doing, we sought to refine the theory by clarifying the conceptualization of CTR resilience processes (i.e. putting alternative logics to work, foregrounding productive action, maintaining and using communication networks, crafting normalcy, and affirming identity anchors). Qualitative analyses revealed all five CTR resilience processes along with novel nuances that expand existing perspectives and refine CTR concepts. Our findings suggest that foregrounding productive action should be analyzed separately from backgrounding negative feelings, and we revisit crafting normalcy with respect to disability. Opportunities for practical application to support families are provided.

Narrative resilience: exploring the role of personal narratives in shaping self-concept and psychological resilience in cancer patients and survivors

Maintaining the continuity of the 'self' is crucial for finding meaning and ensuring psychological well-being. However, the traumatic encounter with cancer disrupts the normal flow of life stories, challenging coherence. Beyond its physical toll, cancer challenges one's sense of self, identity and overall psychological resilience. As personal narratives unfold, encompassing evolving life stories from one's reconstructed past to the present and envisioned future, inherently reflecting the dynamic conception of self, it becomes imperative to investigate how these narratives shape self-concept and resilience throughout the intricate emotional and psychological landscape of the cancer journey. This narrative review explores the intricate relationship among personal narratives, self-concept and psychological resilience in the context of cancer. The study draws on various theoretical constructs, encompassing self-concept, coping, narrative identity, and psychological resilience theories, to provide a comprehensive exploration of the psychological processes involved. Incorporating insights from both Western and Indian philosophical traditions, the review not only enriches the theoretical framework but also emphasizes the practical implications for healthcare practices. Integrating narrative resilience principles into medical education and advocating for culturally sensitive approaches are deemed essential for advancing patient-centred care. The study underscores both practical and theoretical contributions to psycho-oncology, emphasizing the need for personalized narrative interventions, empathetic healthcare strategies, longitudinal studies and innovative technologies that recognize and support the intricate interplay between personal narratives, self-concept and psychological resilience in the cancer survivorship journey.

The gender dimensions of food security: Ethnographic accounts of agro-pastoralists of the Ittu Oromo, East Africa

Gender is the most important but overlooked aspect of food security analysis. Informed by experiential narrative resilience framework, this paper thus discusses the gender dimensions of food security based on the accounts of Ittu Oromo agro-pastoralists. Ethnographic data were collected through participant observation, focus group discussion and narrative interview, and analyzed thematically. Accordingly, four major themes have emerged: women vis-à-vis food among Ittu Oromo, gender division of labour, consumption decision making, and mutual support (quubii) as food security strategy. The finding thus indicated that women are an important actor in food preservation, preparation and allocation in agro-pastoralists of Ittu Oromo. In division of labour, women are largely engaged in such domestic works as caring and cooking while men engage in farm and other non-domestic activities though there are changes today. Consumption decision-making appears to be collective though men tend to dominate. In household food allocation, women seem powerful though they tend to eat least and last but given precedence – during pregnancy and post-partum period. In the context of dearth, women proved innovative that they put heads together to support each other through such village-based institutions as quubii. Among the agro-pastoralists of Ittu Oromo, quubii plays a pivotal role in building women capacity to deal with food shortage. Women, however, remained to be vulnerable particularly when they are head of the family that culturally sound resilience building intervention such as increased access to resource, enhanced participation in decision making, and strengthening mutual support and cooperation (such as quubii) appears crucial.

Narrative Resilience Among Formerly Incarcerated Mothers

Whereas much of the research on mothers in reentry has focused on the resistance strategies these mothers develop to combat the stigma they face, we explore how formerly incarcerated women’s narratives of motherhood reflect their resilience. Using in-depth interviews with 15 formerly incarcerated women, we describe participants’ “narrative resilience”—their focus on their strength and perseverance as they told stories of adversity. Narrative resilience facilitates a novel understanding of formerly incarcerated women’s construction of mothering—one that reveals how women incorporated experiences of structural disadvantage into their mothering identities by framing these experiences as evidence of their tenacity.

Pregnancy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Communicated Narrative Sense-Making and Resilience

ABSTRACT Grounded in communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM) theory and communication theory of resilience (CTR), the current study investigated how women narratively constructed resilience surrounding pregnancy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the adverse effects of stress on pregnant individuals and their babies, it is important to understand the triggers and process of resilience in this context. We interviewed 21 cisgender women who were pregnant during the COVID-19 pandemic to solicit their stories of stress and resilience. Findings revealed that pregnant women managed structural, informational, and interpersonal stressors unique to the COVID-19 pandemic. They engaged in re-storying to reconcile the gap between their expected pregnancy, fueled by the U.S. master narrative of pregnancy and birth, and their lived pregnancy during a pandemic. Participants demonstrated narrative resilience through reconnecting, reframing, and recentering. These findings advance theorizing in communicated resilience by centering CNSM as the sense-making process of enacting resilience and recognizing the importance and burden of resilience during pregnancy. Practical applications are explored such as contributing to narrative-informed programming, interventions, and education efforts regarding future health crises.

Rebuilding Jerusalem: Ezra-Nehemiah as Narrative Resilience

Rebuilding Jerusalem: Ezra-Nehemiah as Narrative Resilience

The Quest of the Grassroots Heroes: Narrative Resilience in Nonprofit Organizing for Human Trafficking Prevention

ABSTRACT Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) dedicated to human trafficking prevention – like the A21 Campaign – can inspire grassroots organizing and localize international advocacy through their websites’ rhetorical narratives. Through the strategic embodiment of organizational identification and narrative resilience, the A21 Campaign motivates members to further the NPO’s activism in their respective communities. By centering volunteer advocates as heroes, framing advocacy outcomes as multi-dimensional, and localizing outreach to globalize impact, the A21 Campaign’s website underscores that narrative-based advocacy must recognize the importance of place, actively support grassroots abolitionists, and reaffirm that survivors’ stories persist far beyond their initial escapes. Implications regarding moral subjectivity, power tensions, and survivor representation emerge, warranting continued discussion of how colonization, surveillance, and inequity can thwart critical efforts to seek transformative global change in gender equality and inclusive activism.

Narrative resilience in the cross-regional support of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 outbreak: The Chinese experiences of cultural input

The healthcare staff who supported Wuhan's rescue work were the first batch of cross-regional supporters during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. To determine the cultural factors that affected their mental health and resilience, as well as the processes that organizations and individuals underwent to transform cultural resources into benefits. This study collected narrative materials in the form of national and individual statements and used Social Ecology of Resilience theory to analyse them. It identified and analysed the cultural factors of resilience in macrosystems, mesosystems, and microsystems according to four themes, namely: cognition, emotion, will, and behaviour. Altogether, it was found that the national voice adopted an optimistic narrative tone reminiscent of that used during the context of war and that the personal or public voice approved of it. The study revealed that the party and government's use of moral narration derived from its heritage culture and its belief in its continuity in new China's culture served as a mechanism of cultural resilience and mobilisation. The above is the experience of the operation of living culture (LC) and cultural heritage (CH) mentioned in Culture Based Development (CBD). In light of this, it was concluded that the predominant form of cultural input during China's national public health crisis has been storytelling with narrative resilience.

Stratis Myrivilis'sLife in the Tomb(1923): Affective Tropes of Modernist Resilience

AbstractIn Stratis Myrivilis's semiautobiographical anti-war 1923 novel Life in the Tomb,1 the fictional protagonist Kostoulas writes letters to his fiancée, describing his physical and emotional state as a soldier at the Macedonian front of World War I. In this article I read Myrivilis's novel as an illuminating test case for the complications and resonance of the concept of “resilience” both as core affect and a generative mode of historical witnessing. Myrivilis's exemplary modernist text reveals the close formal and structural affinities between affective modernism and tropes of narrative resilience. In order to showcase the formal mechanisms of resilience, I close-read Life in the Tomb to trace instances of physical and emotional resilience, while arguing that Myrivilis's “accidental modernism,” as it has been termed by Peter Bien, (1990, 1523: 56–60) is intentionally formalist in an effort to depict modernist endurance to war trauma. Opting to tell the story of what history, and the war, feels like, Myrivilis (through Kostoulas) employs the formalist tropes of defamiliarization and the grotesque to narrate resilience as affective interpenetration between individual and collective states of being.

‘As resilient as an ironweed:' narrative resilience in nonprofit organizing

ABSTRACT This study explores the organizing strategies of a nonprofit organization working to address rural food insecurity. I worked alongside Sustainable Appalachia, a nonprofit organization operating to create sustainable food systems for the people of Appalachia Ohio. Through ethnographic-based research I worked with this organization over the course of one year by volunteering as a clerk at a produce auction, working in community gardens, and attending planning meetings. Throughout these activities I collected discourse, including participant observation field notes, semi-structured interviews, promotional materials, and participatory sketching. Within and through these discourses, I began to shape the theoretical concept of narrative resilience. As I explain, narrative resilience is place-based, heroic, and pragmatic. I end by offering ways in which this framework may be particularly useful to applied communication scholars interested in the study of resilience and nonprofit organizing.

Parents’ Retrospective Storytelling of Their Child’s Coming Out: Investigating Contributions of Communicated Perspective-Taking in Relation to Well-Being

ABSTRACT Guided by communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM) theory, we surveyed parents (n= 133) to elicit retrospective stories of their child’s coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) and to assess perceptions of their child’s communicated perspective-taking (CPT) during the coming out process. Themes emerging from parents’ stories included casual acceptance, supporting, acknowledging their struggle, and learning. Themes and their links to parents’ individual and relational well-being underscored connections between positively-framed retrospective storytelling content, narrative resilience, and well-being, as proposed in CNSM theory. CPT was also positively related to parents’ individual and relational well-being, demonstrating the benefits of LGBT children taking the perspective of their parent when coming out. Findings suggest an extension of CNSM theory’s second proposition, sharpen the conceptualization of narrative resilience, and highlight the important role of CPT to sense-making and individual and relational well-being.

Collective Trauma, Quality of Life and Resilience in Narratives of Third Generation Palestinian Refugee Children

The purpose of this study was to test collective trauma, quality of life and resilience in narratives of Palestinian refugee children. The sample consisted of (30) children aged (14–16) years selected exclusively from five (5) Palestinian refugee camps (Balata, Askar, Ein Beit al-ma’, Nur Shams, and Jenin) established after the 1948 Nakba in the West Bank region of Palestine. Results demonstrated that children in today’s Palestinian camps suffer from collective trauma, they considered the 1948 Nakba as a ‘losing’ experience as it has affected all generations of Palestinian refugees. Results also showed that children in Palestinian camps suffer from poor quality of life; they live in very narrow homes and places, with lack of stadiums and recreational facilities. Participants of this research, however, appeared to demonstrate a high level of resiliency, positive self-efficacy, and responsibility to deal with difficult and stressful events; despite poor quality of life and collective traumatic experiences they have had.

Meaning-Making Trajectories of Resilience in Narratives of Adolescents with MS

To date few studies deepen the construct of meaning-making at the base on the resilience process for adolescent with multiple sclerosis. Starting from a mixed-method of analysis our aim is to fill the gap in the literature by qualitatively exploring the narrative articulation of meaning-making processes highlighting specificities and differences within groups of narratives with high/medium/low resilience measured through the CYRM-28. We collected 29 narratives. The qualitative analysis shows five meaning-making processes at the base of the resilience process: Dependence vs Autonomy; Reconstruction of the time lines; Integration of limits; Enlarging personal assumptive worldview; Connecting emotions and thought. Compared to narratives with low/high scores, differences were evident in the way such processes were articulated. We propose a framework of central issues in the lives of adolescents with multiple sclerosis and a way to determine how these issues can be useful for developing practices and trajectories to support resilient processes.

Young adult women’s narrative resilience in relation to mother-daughter communicated narrative sense-making and well-being

Grounded in communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM) and resilience theorizing, the current study investigated the effects of mother-daughter communication on young adult women’s ( n = 60) narrative construction of resilience over time. Participants wrote stories of difficult experiences at Time 1, discussed the story with their mother in a research lab two days later, and wrote the story again at Time 2. Inductive analyses of daughters’ stories revealed four themes of resilience: acknowledging the struggle, taking action, seeking silver lining, and finding strength in others. Mother-daughter interactions were analyzed for CNSM behaviors—engagement, turn-taking, perspective-taking, and coherence. Mother-daughter coherence and engagement illuminated differences in daughters’ themes of resilience, and all CNSM behaviors positively related to daughters’ increased narrative resilience over time. Findings demonstrated the effect of mother-daughter interaction on young adult women’s resilience, suggesting that CNSM contributes to the meaning-making component of resilience. Implications for advancing CNSM and resilience theorizing are explored.