126 chapter 5 5.1. INTRODUCTION We must accept an undeniable and harsh truth: we live in an era that relentlessly confronts us with a multitude of crises, including devastating natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Katrina in 2005, earthquake in Haiti in 2010, earthquake in Turkey in 2023) and global pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Amidst these unprecedented contemporary challenges (Lagadec, 2009; Lagadec & Topper, 2012) lies a remarkable potential: crises can allow us to question the status quo, find new opportunities and change for the better, instead of merely preserving and/or recovering what we had (i.e., “bouncing back”; Bonanno, 2004). Although this proposition finds support in analyses of human confrontation with past examples of climate change and pandemics (Benedictow, 2004; Degroot et al., 2021), as well as in research on trauma and chronic illness (Bostock et al., 2009; Carver & Antoni, 2004; Meyerson et al., 2011; Tomich & Helgeson, 2004), the possibility of adapting through positive change has remained mostly overlooked by studies on how people can adapt to large-scale contemporary adversities, like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this PhD dissertation we introduced the novel construct transilience to examine whether people perceive they can do more than ‘bounce back’ in the face of adversities (cf. Davoudi et al., 2013), and specifically whether they perceive they can adapt to such adversities through positive change. We define transilience as the perceived capacity to persist (persistence), adapt flexibly (adaptability), and positively transform (transformability) in the face of an adversity. As such, transilience allows to broaden the perspective on human adaptation to adversities while also bringing a positive outlook on it. Across three empirical chapters, we addressed two main overarching research questions. Firstly, we examined whether individuals perceive transilience in the face of contemporary adversities. We hypothesised that people perceive transilience across different threats with varying levels of severity, as well as at different levels (i.e., individual and collective). To test this, we wanted to develop and validate a measure of transilience. Secondly, we examined the association between transilience and different types of adaptation actions, as well as indicators of mental health. Generally, we expected that higher transilience is associated with more adaptation actions and with better mental health across different socio-political contexts with varying levels of threat severity. In the following sections, we summarise the main findings of this dissertation and we elaborate on the main theoretical implications of our research. After that, we discuss
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