Building Resilient Practitioners: Definitions and Practitioner Understandings

This paper turns the conceptual focus of resilience from that of the service user and community to the experience of social workers themselves. It reports on aspects of an ongoing study into social work practitioner resilience in health care and non-statutory practice settings in New Zealand. This continuing study explores the perceptions of experienced social workers in relation to resilience in the face of workplace demands and stressors. After clarifying common definitional challenges regarding the conceptualisation of resilience in the literature, qualitative data from twenty-one interviews are examined and a conceptual framework is proposed which identifies three components of resilience: core attributes, practice context and mediating factors. The narratives of the participants suggest a multi-faceted and dynamically-balanced awareness of resilience that emphasises the relational and contextual characteristics of their experience.