The interplay of community resilience potential, trust in the future and social well-being

Community resilience (CR) has been mainly investigated as the ability of the community to respond to far-reaching circumstances. Relatively less attention has been given to the understanding of CR as the ability of the community to deal with everyday problems, that is, community resilience potential (CRP). Using partial least squares path modelling, this study aims to elucidate how communities deal with issues that trouble their everyday functioning by investigating how this is related to social well-being and trust in the future in a sample of 1278 subjects across 10 Italian communities with different population size and density. Results revealed that CRP was significantly associated with both social well-being and trust in the future. Furthermore, in the more densely and heavily populated territorial communities, the link between CRP and social well-being was stronger than in smaller and less dense communities. The findings suggested that social well-being can be taken as a reliable community psychological resilient outcome. Moreover, CRP enables communities to respond positively to a wide range of phenomena, both large-scale crises and everyday problems with variability across diverse contexts. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.