Family Resilience: A Conceptual Review

A family is a primary institution in the society which has dynamic system, and it frequently proceeds especially when its members face a crisis situation. The family’s efforts and success to rise from crisis situations are known as family resilience. The purpose of writing this article is to get better understanding about family resilience as a whole concept. This article is based on a review of literature and journals obtained from various sources. The investigation is conducted through the official websites of Google Scholar, PROQUEST, Research Gate, SAGE Publisher and Blackwell Publisher. The results of reviewing the literatures reveal that family resilience is a growing concept. As a concept, family resilience can be seen as trait (nature) and process. The trait review says that family resilience is strongly influenced by several protective factors as the primary key that a family can revive after experiencing adversity. The perspective of family resilience as a process explains that family resilience is built by the success of families using coping strategies to cope with the stressors in their lives. Meanwhile, the framework of family resilience is built through the theory of systems in the family which combines ecological and developmental perspectives. These perspectives are used to view family functions in relation to sociocultural contexts and multi-dimensional family life circles. The perspectives are then widely developed in researches on family resilience. Most studies show that there are many factors that drive a family to reach a post-crisis resilience condition. This factor is called a protection factor. Researches are also interested in revealing protection factor and risk factors that cause a family to continuously be in a crisis situation. Very limited researches that have been conducted in developing a cultural dimension are able to describe how a family achieves resilient conditions in a way that is distinctive or indigenous in accordance with the environmental conditions in which the family resid