Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Community Resilience: A Scoping Review of the Social & Health Sciences Literature

Background: Although research has focused on the idea of community resilience as the most effective ways for communities respond to and recover from stress, many gaps remain in the science of community resilience. While recent decades have seen an evolution in the conceptualization and operationalization of the term “community resilience”, the relevance, scope and intent of the concept of community resilience in social and human sciences research remains sparse and fragmented. Even when resilience concepts are more widely acknowledged, there are challenges with transferring community resilience frameworks into pragmatic action. Similarly, measuring community resilience and bringing together robust metrics that comprehensively measure physical, social, and other human impact is still challenging. The purpose of the scoping review was therefore, to map research literature on community resilience to: (1) identify the conceptualization of community resilience in social and health sciences research; (2) identify what scales exist to assess this important construct, and (3) assess the psychometric quality of available scales that measure community resilience variables.

Methods: We used the six-stage process of scoping review outlined by Arksey and O’Malley (2005). Academic Search Complete (EBSCO), MEDLINE, Social Work Abstracts, and Google Scholar databases were used to identify relevant studies in social and health sciences. Inclusion criteria for this study included studies 1) published in peer-reviewed journals, 2) published in English; 3) conducted using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods and 4) discussed community resilience elements in the social and health sciences. Studies that were limited to the ecological context pertaining to natural disasters, climate change, land degradation were excluded from the study. The initial search returned 8,258 potentially relevant studies with key word- community resilience. The resulting sample for this scoping review was composed of 59 studies published between 2012 and 2018.

Results: Findings from the study indicated no evidence of a common, agreed definition of community resilience. Despite this common definition however, there were several core elements of community resilience that were common among the definitions. These core elements included local knowledge, community networks and relationships, communication, governance, leadership, resources, economic investment, community strengths, social capital, collective agency and self-organization, and community capacity were salient elements of community resilience. Findings showed that the concept of resilience has also moved from a peripheral ecological concept to a central goal in the development discourse. While the conceptualization of community resilience has been a popular concept, there were challenges in the operationalization of community resilience measures.

Implications: As building community resilience is becoming an important topic in the current debate about achieving positive community development outcomes, study findings provide practice implications to include core elements of community resilience in community-based strategies and development efforts. We argue that focusing on these elements may be more productive than defining community resilience as a distinct concept. Further, the scoping review methodology provide an opportunity to identify key concepts; gaps in the research; and types and sources of evidence to inform practice, policymaking, and research for any topic areas that are heterogenous in nature.