Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Aug 2;18(15):8189. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18158189.
The multifaceted concept of resilience is widely used to describe individual or societal abilities to withstand and adjust to external pressures. In relation to health, resilience can help us to understand a positive health development despite adverse circumstances. The authors of this article aimed to disentangle this complex concept by elaborating on three metaphors commonly used to describe resilience. Similarities and differences between resilience as a rock, a dandelion, and a steel spring are discussed. The metaphors partly overlap but still provide slightly different perspectives on the development and manifestation of resilience. With reference to longitudinal studies of long-term health development, the article also elaborates on how resilience relates to temporal dimensions commonly used in epidemiological studies: age, cohort, and period. Moreover, the interaction between resilience at individual, organizational, and societal levels is discussed. In conclusion, it is argued that public health sciences have great potential to further a theoretical discussion that improves our understanding of resilience and promotes the integration of individual- and community-level perspectives on resilience.
韧性是一个多方面的概念，被广泛用于描述个人或社会承受和适应外部压力的能力。就健康而言，韧性可以帮助我们理解在不利环境下积极的健康发展。本文的作者旨在通过阐述三个常用的隐喻来阐明这个复杂的概念，以描述韧性。韧性作为岩石、蒲公英和钢弹簧的相似点和不同点进行了讨论。这些隐喻部分重叠，但仍提供了关于韧性发展和表现的略微不同的视角。本文还参考了关于长期健康发展的纵向研究，阐述了韧性与流行病学研究中常用的时间维度（年龄、队列和时期）的关系。此外，还讨论了个体、组织和社会层面的韧性之间的相互作用。总之，有人认为，公共卫生科学具有很大的潜力，可以进一步开展理论讨论，从而增进我们对韧性的理解，并促进将韧性的个体和社区层面观点整合起来。
