Presented at the Biennial Conference of the Society for Community Research and Action (June, 2017)

1. WELLNESS & RESILIENCE
Resilience can be considered both a wellness process and outcome
of individuals and communities. In the context of adversity, it
involves elements of recovery from challenges and threats,
sustainability of well-being, and the capacity to adapt positively,
grow, and prosper (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Wright &
Masten, 2015; Zautra, Hall, & Murray, 2008). More than a static trait
of individuals, resilience involves a transactional wellness-
promoting process that reflects interconnected and ongoing
interactions between persons, culture, and context. These
processes (which must be continuously nurtured) emphasize
cultivating, enhancing, and sustaining culturally-syntonic strengths
and utilizing internal and external resources in order to promote
multidimensional well-being through positive context- and culture-
specific adaptation (Southwick, Bonanno, Masten, Panter-Brick, &
Yehuda, 2014; Ungar, 2010).
Resilience-based psychosocial interventions promote strategies for:
o preventing chronic physiological stress responses that confer
significant health risks,
o sustaining positive and meaningful engagement in dynamic and
challenging environments,
o impacting future adversity through modification of transactions
between persons, environments, and culture; and
o transforming adversity into growth and thriving.
A comprehensive model is needed that incorporates the importance
of culture and context in conceptualizing wellness processes and
outcomes. Harrell’s Person-Environment-and-Culture-Emergence
(PEaCE) metatheoretical framework is offered as a foundation for
resilience-oriented interventions.
IMPLICATIONS FOR
INTERVENTIONS
An integration of wellness and healing
practices across diverse cultures resulted in
the identification of three common processes:
Communal, Contemplative, and
Empowerment. Within the PEaCE framework
they are considered the central types of
Wellness-Promoting Person-in-Culture-in-
Context transactions. It is hypothesized that
health and well-being outcomes are
enhanced to the extent that interventions
incorporate culturally-syntonic practices that
activate these three shared mechanisms of
change. While the core elements can be
observed across diverse cultural contexts,
their expression and effectiveness within
interventions is dependent upon their
resonance with the salient and relevant
cultural and contextual factors operating.
The core elements of the three processes will
be described with implications for how they
may be utilized in interventions.
Building Resilience and Promoting Wellness through
Person-in-Culture-in-Context Transactions
Shelly P. Harrell, Caitlin Sorenson, Lily Rowland, Jessica Styles, Eneyew Girma & Francesca Parker
COMMUNAL PROCESSES
CORE ELEMENTS: INTERCONNECTEDNESS,
RELATIONSHIP, ALLIANCES, BELONGING
Promotes resilience by:
o Strengthening connectedness to self-others-world
o Reconnecting to humanity, nature, spirit, ancestors, culture,
values, etc.
o Building and enhancing sense of community and belonging
o Strengthening interpersonal relationships that are affirming
and growth-promoting
o Enhancing connections to supportive social structures and
settings
Intervention Implications: Utilize rituals and creation of
meaningful shared experiences to facilitate bonding. Provide
opportunities for sharing personal and community narratives of
struggles and triumphs (e.g., giving testimony and bearing
witness). Create safe spaces that explicitly provide affirmation,
validation, encouragement, and acceptance. Create positive
and celebratory experiences. Identify and enhance
connectedness to microcommunities of identity, as well as to a
larger sense of connectedness to shared human experience.
Poster and References available upon request from
shelly.harrell@pepperdine.edu
APPLYING WELLNESS-PROMOTING TRANSACTIONS IN RESILIENCE INTERVENTIONS
PEaCE METATHEORY &
“PERSON-IN-CULTURE-IN-CONTEXT”
TRANSACTIONS
The PEaCE metatheoretical framework (Harrell, 2015, 2017)
offers a psychoecocultural approach to the conceptualization of
individual, relational, and collective wellness outcomes that are
hypothesized to emerge from ongoing transactions within and
between multiple, interconnected biopsychorelational (“psycho”),
socioecological (“eco”), and multicultural/intersectional (“cultural”)
processes.
The PEaCE metatheoretical framework:
o Centers culture as a system that is infused into the multiple
dimensions of persons and environments through
psychocultural and sociocultural processes. Culture is thus a
necessary consideration in understanding the development
and expression of wellness outcomes.
o Conceptualizes health and well-being outcomes as emergent
from ongoing and dynamic Person-in-Culture-in-Context
transactions such that the three systems are considered
inseparable and always in relationship with each other (e.g.,
persons do not exist outside of culture and contexts, culture is
expressed by persons in particular contexts, contexts are
shaped by persons and cultural norms).
o Suggests that the bidirectional and mutually transforming
processes that occur within the PEaCE Transactional Field can
be pathogenic (resulting in distress, disease, dysfunction),
neutral, or wellness-promoting (resulting in health, well-being,
resilience, thriving, and optimal functioning).
CONTEMPLATIVE PROCESSES
CORE ELEMENTS: AWARENESS, CONSCIOUSNESS,
FOCUSING, REFLEXIVITY, ATTENTION-REGULATION
Promotes resilience by:
o Increasing awareness of internal and external
experience
o Enhancing experiential awareness
o Facilitating critical consciousness
o Exploration of values, meaning and purpose
o Practicing sustained and directed attention
o Increasing confidence in one’s “inner wisdom”
Intervention Implications: Provide opportunities for quiet
spaces and “being still”. Include space for exploratory and
critical dialogue, journaling, art-making, and other
contemplative processes. Utilize culturally-syntonic wisdom
quotes, proverbs, songs, sacred readings, etc. to stimulate
reflective processes. Provide space and opportunities for
reconnection to internally experienced resources including
awareness of somatic, intuitive, meaning-making
processes.
EMPOWERMENT PROCESSES
CORE ELEMENTS: AGENCY, CHOICE, VOICE,
ENGAGEMENT, TRANSFORMATIVE ACTION
Promotes resilience by:
o Identifying existing assets/strengths or developing new
strengths/resources
o Facilitating motivation, commitment, creativity, and
goal-directed activity
o Developing and strengthening culturally-syntonic,
values-congruent behaviors and settings
o Creating opportunities to find and speak one’s
personal and collective truths
o Mobilizing participatory, social justice and liberation-
oriented activities
Intervention Implications: Include opportunities to
directly plan and/or implement action that emerges from
communal and contemplative processes. Provide
opportunities to experience transformative shifts during
intervention implementation. Create space for
inspiration, creativity, idea-generation, brainstorming.
Identify options for engaging with one’s environment that
optimizes strengths, participation, and liberation.