Network projects

Research Priority NetworkDevelopment and Persistence of Human Capability and

Resilience in their social and geographical contextwww.ucl.ac.uk/capabilityandresilience

Imperial College London


Resilience in their social and geographical contextNetworkNetwork projectsprojects

Positive adjustment within the family contextProf Ingrid Schoon (City)Dr Amanda Sacker (UCL)

Resilience and quality of life in early old ageProf David Blane (Imperial)Prof Dick Wiggins (City)Dr Scott Montgomery (Karolinska)

Resilient populations: a geographical perspectiveDr Richard Mitchell (Edinburgh)Prof Danny Dorling (Sheffield)Prof Stephen Platt (Edinburgh)

Sources of resilience to adverse social environmentsProf Stephen Stansfeld (QMUL)Prof Sarah Curtis (QMUL)

How do welfare policies and practices build resilienceProf Margaret Whitehead (Liverpool)Prof Chris Jones (Liverpool)

Stability and persistence of resilience in early and mid-adult lifeDr Amanda Sacker (UCL)Prof Ingrid SchoonProf Dieter Wolke


Resilience in their social and geographical context

Aim of the Network

To contribute to policy by improving the scientific understanding of the socio-economic, biological and psychological circumstances that contribute to human capability and resilience over the life course



Resilience• Is showing positive adjustment despite being

exposed to adversity• Positive adjustment involves a variety of

capabilities: cognitive, behavioural, health-related, motivations, temperamental ….

• Adversity can be due to psychological, biological, social and economic influences

• Definition and assessment dependent on the type of adversity and the capabilities in focus



Capability• Based on the work of Amartya Sen:• “Freedoms and functionings”• A property of the social and economic

environment, not of the individual• Examples: equal access to education by all

genders and ethnic groups• This was found to improve health indices

dramatically in the state of Kerala



Contextual model of resilience and capability

Health Welfare

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Scientific Objectives

• How are human capability and resilience developed and fostered by relationships within families and households? (Projects 1 and 2)

• What are the contributions of neighbourhood and locality characteristics and participation in the community? (Projects 1, 2 , 3 and 5)

• How are capability and resilience influenced by education, training and relationships at work? (Projects 3, 5 and 6)

• How do earlier life relationships and experiences contribute to resilience in the face of illness, ageing and social adversity at later phases of the life course? (Projects 1, 2, 3 and 4)

• How can public services contribute to maintaining and increasing human capability and resilience? (Especially projects 2, 5 and 6)



Resilience• Resilience came to light as the by-product of

identifying harm done to children and the best possible ways to help them develop beyond adverse risks. These studies prompted researchers to wonder what it was that, in turn, enabled those who successfully managed their lives in spite of the difficulties they encountered (Werner & Smith, 1982; Garmezy, 1985).



Theories of resilience• The bulk of research on resilience has been rooted in a

psychopathological framework (Grothberg 2003). • A new wave of research using a developmental,

‘lifespan’ or life course framework has steadily grown (Staudinger, Marsiske & Baltes 1993) out of these original investigations.

• The concept of resilience as a discernible entity comes ultimately, not from theorists, but from the observation of the lived experiences of ‘survivors’



Preliminary general approach• Social, economic environments may promote

capability

• Capabilities cannot necessary be inferred from ‘commodities’ or income

• Model = malaria, bilharzia, schistosomiasis

• BUT passing through a ‘capability-promoting’ environment may give lasting resilience

Research Priority NetworkDevelopment and persistence of Human Capability and


Positive adjustment within the family contextProf Ingrid Schoon (City)Dr Amanda Sacker (UCL)

Studying lifecourse and current sources of resilience in 1958, 1970 and Millenium

Cohorts



Economic adversity and early child development

Family financial circumstances and child temperament data collected for babies born in the Millennium

• 27% of babies grow up in households with less than £10401 net family income

• These babies show greater risk of adjustment problems than more privileged peers



Can risk be reduced ?

• Possible sources of resilience include:

• relatively favourable material conditions in family household,

• positive socio-emotional interactions between parent and child



Sources of resilience to low household income: measures

• Socio-emotional factors: breastfeeding, attachment, parental beliefs,

malaise, self-esteem, social support, grandparents, hours of child care,

• Material factors: area quality, benefits, housing quality, overcrowding,

damp, car access, temperature in baby’s room, no central heating, subjective perception of financial difficulty



Disadvantaged social class: sources of resilience

• Can relationships at home and work constitute a source of resilience against psychological consequences of disadvantaged social class?



Sources of resilience• Personal life:• Partnership, length of relationship,

happiness, parenthood

• Working life:• Having a job, hours of work, job

satisfaction

Research Priority NetworkDevelopment and Persistence of Human Capability and Resilience in their social and

geographical context

Social Gradient in psychological distressNCDS BCS70

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Imperial College London

Resilience over the life course

Quality of life through early old age Imperial College London research team: • Zoë Hildon• David Blane (Principal investigator) • Gopal Netuveli• Scott Montgomery - Karolinska Institute, Stockholm • Richard Wiggins- City University, London



Research on aging discovers widespread resilience

• Aging satisfaction appears to be hardly influenced by age-associated physical and socioeconomic changes.

• It has been theorised therefore that faced with age-related increases in somatic and socioeconomic risk, the aging self possesses ‘reserve capacities’ which help avert significant changes in aging satisfaction (Staudinger, Marsiske & Baltes 1995) (Staudinger, Freund, Linden & Maas 1999).



Is ageing necessarily accompanied by economic adversity?

• Loss of the ‘work role’• Decrease in income• BUT – effort reward imbalance may improve• Income relative to others’ and to efforts

expended may be more important than absolute income



Resilient social locations

• states like Kerala, Sri Lanka and Costa Rica achieve life expectancies comparable with Europe, despite levels of income which are a fraction of those in Europe.

• Characteristics of these resilient social locations include land reform, female education and long-standing public health programmes.

• What are the equivalents to these in modern industrial societies?



Factors fostering resilience?• Land reform is about living standards;

presumably its equivalents could be pensions and welfare benefits.

• Female education is about economic and social participation; so its equivalents might be post-retirement employment opportunities, life-long learning and a Third Age approach to life.


Resilience in their social and geographical contextPolicies promoting capability in the labour market: comparing UK and

Sweden• Whitehead and colleagues researched the

relationship of long term illness to employment in UK and Sweden

• In UK, men with long term illness mostly remain in employment if they are in a more advantaged social class

• Working class men are forced out of the labour market by long term illness

• This different increased during the 1980s



Evolution of relationship of health to labour force participation 1973-93

• Manual occupations were hit far worse than non-manual by the 1980s recession

• Most men with long term illness did remain employed• In classes I and II illness did not have an enormous

effect on employment status• Illness was far more likely to be associated with non-

employment in manual groups



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Sources of resilience to adverse social environments Prof. Stephen Stansfeld, Prof. Sarah Curtis, Queen Mary University of London

Health and educational attainment outcomes for children and young people in adverse environments (defined in terms of socio-economic conditions and low levels of educational attainment in the areas where they live). Data sets: The Health Survey for England (HSE) which in 2002 includes a special booster sample of children and the RELACHS survey of 2790 children in schools in East London in 2001. This will enable us to test whether mental and physical health outcomes for individual children are related to the educational attainment levels and employment conditions in their areas of residence, independently of other socio-economic factors. Educational attainment will also be examined as an outcome of individual and neighbourhood socio-economic conditions and educational environment.



Resilient placesEconomically declining areas in Britain with lower than expected mortality ratesRichard Mitchella, Helena Tunstalla, Julia Gibbsa, Steve Platta, Danny Dorlingb

a Research Unit in Health, Behaviour and Change, University of Edinburghb Department of Geography, University of Sheffield

This research is funded by an ESRC network award L326253061. The Research Unit in Health, Behaviour and Change is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of The Scottish Executive Health Department (SEHD) and NHS Health Scotland. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) not of SEHD or HEBS.

www.ucl.ac.uk/capabilityandresiliencewww.ucl.ac.uk/capabilityandresilience



A 2-stage study design

• 1) Look for resilient areas– (quantitative & outcome based)

• 2) Explore the history, character and nature of a sample of these areas to try and identify the foundations and mechanisms of their resilience – (qualitative & process based)



Operationalising concepts• To find resilience we needed to

– identify areas with a history of economic adversity– look at subsequent changes in mortality rates amongst

those areas• This meant defining and measuring ‘economic adversity’,

‘changes in mortality rate’ and ‘area’– Change in mortality rate and in economy is a long term

process; we need to work ‘over time’– Paucity of data available to describe 30 or 40 years of

change across the whole country; the census and 13 million mortality records



Identifying adversity• We have initially defined ‘area’ as parliamentary

constituency• We decided that the degree to which an area

suffered economic adversity would be measured by the proportion of its residents who were in &/or moved into, ‘adverse situations’

• So, we needed to define what an ‘adverse situation’ is



Putting it all together• Resilient constituencies: those which were poor and

declined but which had better than expected (change in) mortality rate– Poorest third of constituencies in 1971 (based upon

their ‘adversity’ score)– Most declining ¼ of these ‘poor’ constituencies

between 1971-1991 (adversity scores getting worse)– Better record of (change in) mortality rates



Judging resilience

• 2 researchers independently assessed every chart & selected ‘resilient’ areas

• A set of areas emerged which offered most evidence of resilience across a wide range of age groups



Example of ‘resilient’ area • Birmingham Sparkbrook &

Small Heath: inner city area that has attracted many different waves of immigrants historically and in recent years

• Since 1971 socio-economic adversity score consistently put it in worst 5% of GB constituencies

• Compared to other disadvantaged areas has had lower than expected mortality at a range of ages, most markedly amongmiddle and older age groups



Possible explanations• We must remember that ‘lower than expected mortality’,

is not necessarily the same as resilience…• Artefact? (is it a different population?)

– Healthy migrant effect of first generation immigrants who have not been exposed to adversity in the area for all of their lives

• Resilience?– Presence of large community of South Asian origin/descent possibly

keeping mortality rates lower than expected. – Cancer deaths amongst South Asians known to be lower than other

ethnic groups in GB - and this is the main cause of death lowering overall mortality rates in this area.

– South Asians known to have higher mortality rates from heart disease than GB average. This applies in this area, but there is no consistent pattern of rates being higher than those of other disadvantaged areas.

– Are protective lifestyles fostered amidst adversity?



A programme of contextual longitudinal research

• Sources of resilience may arise at different levels (household, workplace, neighbourhood, area, nation)

• Social and economic policies may promote or impede capability and resilience

• All of these processes take place over the life course

Documents

Network projects