Resilience in migrant population: supportive factors and practices.

Many migrants, especially those with more vulnerable or precarious positions and refugees, face multiple stressors and traumatic experiences which may have long-term adversely implications for their well-being and physical and mental health. Despite these major stressors, many migrants show resilience and do not develop disorders (Cardoso & Thompson, 2010; Greeff & Holtzkamp, 2007; Pieloch, McCullough, & Marks, 2016; Rashid & Gregory, 2014). Resilience has been defined in different ways. The most common definition of resilience in the past few years is: positive adaptation despite adversity (Luthar, 2006). Waller (2001) defines resilience as a positive adaptation characterised by an outcome of successful adaptation in response to threatening or unpleasant conditions. Other definitions are similar, and at its heart, resilience is the ability to recover from shocks and overcome adversity (Crawford, Wright, & Masten, 2005). Most of the researchers describe resilience as the significant capacity of individuals to demonstrate resourcefulness by using internal and external resources in response to various challenges (Grant & Cavanagh, 2007; Pooley & Cohen, 2010). Others define resilience as a process. For instance, Connor & Davidson (2003) observe that resilience is a process of individual empowerment that creates biological psychological balance in response to dangerous conditions (see also Rutter, 1990). They claim that resilience reflects the personal characteristics that enable the individual to flourish in the face of difficulty, and that it is the multidimensional quality of an individual that varies with changing contexts of time, age, gender, culture and also the differences in life experience. In the Psychology, the contemporary use of the term resilience has emerged in the 1960s, and since then there is an ample thread of theorizing and research related to risk and protective factors. Protective factors may be internal or external, or divided into micro, meso and macro-level (individual, social and cultural) (Connor & Davidson, 2003, Ungar, 2013). Internal protective factors may be intrinsic or developed by an individual, such as autonomy, self-esteem, positivity and sociability. External protective factors are elements that exist in an individual or family’s environment, such as supportive relationships with extended family members and friends and community resources. There is a growing interest in understanding how protective factors operate towards making migrants and their families resilient so that practices and policies may be implemented to sustain and promote their well-being and adaptation (e.g., Siriwardhana & Stewart, 2013). This paper provides the context for the discussion on factors which can help the resilience of migrants themselves and which may, through that, create healthier, happier and more productive multicultural societies.