Rethinking Resilience: How Afro Barbadians Navigate Difficulties in their Daily Lives

A small body of critical and qualitative research demonstrates that the prevailing conceptualizations of resilience and methods used to study resilience fail to account for 1) how people make meaning of and correspondingly respond to situations and interactions in their daily lives, and how this may be different than the researcher’s experience and knowledge; 2) how adversity can actually be an ordinary, chronic part of some peoples’ daily lives; and 3) how access to power and the use of power by those in a given context results in interactions and situations becoming adversities for some as opposed to others. Hence, these findings call into question what is thought to be known about resilience and how to foster resilience for some cultural groups and in some contexts. This presentation reports on a grounded theory study investigating how Afro Barbadians in Barbados successfully navigate difficulties in their daily lives. Data collection involved 40 semi-structured interviews with persons who had successfully overcome difficulties and individuals who had supported them in formal and informal capacities; observation of contexts participants deemed crucial to their experiences; and review of policies and other texts which shaped participants’ experiences. The implications of this study for creating programs and policies aimed at supporting Afro Barbadians at home and across the diaspora in leading healthy lives and overcoming difficulties successfully will also be discussed.