Discerning Community Resilience in Disadvantaged Communities in the Context of Violence and Injury Prevention

Abstract

The study of community resilience is a relatively under-explored area. Accordingly, in an attempt to further our understanding of community resilience, we present a study focused on the development of a questionnaire to assess and delineate the nature of community resilience across three low socio-economic neighbourhoods in the Western Cape. The study embraced a participatory framework that incorporated several phases. Data indicated significant associations between some of the dimensions of community resilience, namely, neighbourhood cohesion and community hope (p<0.001, Fisher-Exact); community structures and leadership and social supports (p<0.05, Fisher-Exact); the ownership of a business and physical security (p<0.001, Chi-squared); and the ownership of a business and social supports (p<0.05, Chi-squared). However, some of the community resilience measures, such as the knowledge of treatment of injuries yielded no associations with any of the other measures. Using the Chi-squared test, it was found that there were significant differences between the three communities on three of the resiliency measures: neighbourhood cohesion (p<0.001), knowledge of treatment of injuries (p<0.001), and community structures and leadership (p<0.001). The results suggested that communities may have the capacity to develop resilient responses and that these responses differ across neighbourhoods. By way of conclusion, we discuss the findings and review the implications for the further conceptualisation and operationalisation of the notion of community resilience.