Editor’s Essay: Resilience and Perseverance
Abstract
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC RELATIONS RESEARCH 2020, VOL. 32, NOS. 5–6, 155–159 https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2021.1922046 As we pass the one-year mark of the global pandemic that is COVID-19 and slog into yet another century of the social infection that is systemic racism, the term “resilience” has perhaps been overused to the point of meaninglessness. Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about what “resilience” might mean in the context of publishing in a peer-reviewed academic journal, as well as the relationship between resilience and perseverance. Recognizing Resilience One of the challenges related to “resilience” has been the lack of scholarly consensus on a definition for the term, on factors contributing to or comprising resilience, and on ways to best measure resilience or to operationalize it. In short, “resilience is a complex construct that may have specific meaning for a particular individual, family, organization, society and culture” (Southwick et al., 2014, n.p.). In a comprehensive review of psychology literature, Fletcher and Sarkar (2013) found that adversity and positive adaptation are core elements to many definitions of resilience; these authors attribute “the introduction of these concepts to the resilience literature” (p. 13) to Luthar (2006), Luthar and Cicchetti (2000), and Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker (2000). The