Today I realized "resilience" in psychology is inequality in sociology. Something is a "risk factor" if it has an average negative effect. If everyone overcame the risk equally there would be no negative effect and thus no resilience. Resilience means some people overcome it and others don't.
@philipncohen what? This is just not true. Maybe in some specific types of operationalizations or analyses that you might care about for a specific question it's true. But it's not true across psychology as a whole that there's no understanding of inequality or of within-individual resilience as well (times you are more or less resilient eg). Really confused by this point and claim
@grimalkina I read an ed psych paper that defined resilience as when an individual with a risk factor - defined as something that produces a bad outcome on average - does better than the average for the affected group. Just mathematically that seems like a measure of inequality. (I know psychologists know and care about inequality - and the inequitable distribution of risk factors, and thus need for resilience, etc)
@philipncohen ah I see I see. Some of the replies here seem to be taking this in a different direction and reading that colored how I read your original post!
@philipncohen It's a good conceptual pair to highlight a key psych-socio contrast: one discipline looks for explanations (first, at any rate) in individual differences, the other in social structure.
@grimalkina@philipncohen That's why I said "first". Sociology doesn't ignore the individual either, but the centre of sociology is much more towards structure and that of psychology much more towards the individual.
@bthalpin@philipncohen I mean many, many subfields of psychology including all the work I've ever done or studied in crisis work and applied psych start deeply with structure. Having literally worked on "resilience" in areas like trauma-informed health design I really don't think this is a fair point. Maybe a specific fight you want to have with some small academic subset, not the whole big field.
@bthalpin@philipncohen like, social constructivism and similar theories are from psychology! Plenty of ways to be a psychologist who doesn't really believe in fixed individual diffs at all and in fact many historical traditions in psych for this
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