The present study examines, as research questions, which and to what extent psychological and demographic variables significantly predict individual, community, and societal resilience among a sample of Czech Republic adults (N = 1,100) six months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The research tools included the following scales: Societal, community, and individual resilience; hope, well-being; morale; distress symptoms; a sense of danger; and perceived threats. The results indicated the following: (a) Correlation analysis shows that resilience is significantly and positively correlated with supporting coping factors and significantly and negatively correlated with suppressing coping factors. (b) A comparison of supporting coping indicators (hope, well-being, and morale) and suppressing coping indicators (distress symptoms, sense of danger, and perceived threats) in the Czech Republic with those variables in Slovakia and Israel indicated that Israel reported higher resilience, higher supporting coping indicators, and lower suppressing coping factors. Three-path analysis among the Czech sample indicated that the best predictor of SR was the level of hope, the best predictor of CR was morale, and the best predictor of IR was the sense of danger. In an attempt to explain these findings in the discussion section, we refer to the background of Czech society and a possible connection to the findings.
Resilience, Psychological , Adult , Humans , Czech Republic , Slovakia/epidemiology , Ukraine , Coping Skills
The study examined the resilience and coping of samples from Ukraine and five nearby countries during the war in Ukraine. The research focused on (1) the levels of community and societal resilience of the Ukrainian respondents compared with the populations of five nearby European countries and (2) commonalities and diversities concerning coping indicators (hope, well-being, perceived threats, distress symptoms, and sense of danger) across the examined countries. A cross-sectional study was conducted, based on data collection through Internet panel samples, representing the six countries' adult populations. Ukrainian respondents reported the highest levels of community and societal resilience, hope, and distress symptoms and the lowest level of well-being, compared to the population of the five nearby European countries. Hope was the best predictor of community and societal resilience in all countries. Positive coping variables, most notably hope, but also perceived well-being are instrumental in building resilience. While building resilience on a societal level is a complex, multifaceted task, various dimensions must be considered when planning actions to support these states. It is essential to monitor the levels of resilience, during and following the resolution of the crisis, both in Ukraine and in the neighboring countries.
The question of visibility and invisibility in social understanding is examined here. First, the phenomenological account of expressive phenomena and key ideas of the participatory sense-making theory are presented with regard to the issue of visibility. These accounts plead for the principal visibility of agents in interaction. Although participatory sense-making does not completely rule out the existence of opacity and invisible aspects of agents in interaction, it assumes the capacity of agents to integrate disruptions, opacity and misunderstandings in mutual modulation. Invisibility is classified as the dialectical counterpart of visibility, i.e., as a lack of sense whereby the dynamics of perpetual asking, of coping with each other and of improvements in interpretation are brought into play. By means of empirical exemplification this article aims at demonstrating aspects of invisibility in social interaction which complement the enactive interpretation. Without falling back into Cartesianism, it shows through dramaturgical analysis of a practice called "(Inter)acting with the inner partner" that social interaction includes elements of opacity and invisibility whose role is performative. This means that opacity is neither an obstacle to be overcome with more precise understanding nor a lack of meaning, but rather an excess of sense, a "hiddenness" of something real that has an "active power" (Merleau-Ponty). In this way it contributes to on-going social understanding as a hidden potentiality that naturally enriches, amplifies and in part constitutes human participation in social interactions. It is also shown here that this invisible excess of sense already functions on the level of self-relationship due to the essential self-opacity and self-alterity of each agent of social interaction. The analysis consequently raises two issues: the question of the enactive ethical stance toward the alterity of the other and the question of the autonomy of the self-opaque agent.
