Community resilience following disasters: The role of social identity in collective coping after the Manchester Arena bomb

This thesis explores collective resilience following a mass traumatic event experienced within a place-based community: the Manchester Arena bomb in 2017. It combines a systematic review, an interview study and a case review to identify and address gaps in previous understandings of community resilience to disasters. A meta-synthesis of the literature (21 studies) aims to identify the strengthening and undermining factors related to how place-based communities cope with a large-scale traumatic event in their communities. Then, through thematic analysis, the experiences of eighteen community members following the 2017 Manchester Arena bomb were explored. The overall objective is to uncover what promotes community resilience following a terrorist attack through the theoretical lens of the Social Identity Approach. Three superordinate themes are presented and analysed: 1) Identity 2) Coping 3) Transforming. The themes relate to the existing identity of the city, collective coping following the bomb and transforming Manchester for the better. This research finds that the existing identity of the city is crucial to coping ability and to the community moving on from the disaster with a sense of hopefulness for the future. The ways in which the findings can be applied to two contrasting case studies (a research participant and a therapeutic client) are then discussed and the Human Givens Approach is introduced alongside the Social Identity Approach. Through this process, a set of emerging guidelines for therapeutic practice are presented. Overall findings are then critically discussed and the implications for further research, policy and practice are highlighted. The thesis concludes with the finding that existing place-based identity is key to community resilience following a bomb. The social identity approach provides a useful way of bringing together the various component parts of community resilience after disasters