Women´s Resilience in a popular neighbourhood located in Salvador, Bahia: personal and contextual resources

Abstract

This is a qualitative and exploratory study that aim to characterize the personal and contextual resources used by women considered "resilient" for their ability to overcome, in a social positive way, adversities such as: abandonment, violence, unemployment and disease. The study attempts to identify how these women, when they themselves were children and adolescents, perceived and explored their own environment and how this environment in which they grew up in functioned within the world around them and the opportunities it offered. Furthermore, what personal and contextual resources they were able to utilize in this environment. The study chose five participants from a group named "Conversa de família" (Talk about family), located in an Educative Center, in a suburb of Salvador, Bahia. The researchers applied a semi-structured interview about the life history and the sociometric network. The analysis was based on an ecological perspective of human development, which considers the person in context and developmental processes in time, as well as the Psychodramatic approach. The results of the study indicated a "resilience of survival", based on their own performance, where the difficulties were the means for their success as people. The study also revealed the presence of real or imaginary figures, and the importance for these women to have a relational networks, inside and/or outside the family, as well as the possibility for these women of move in this network, so these forms of relationships could functioning as a basis for future relationships. Some common features appeared in the study: confidence in themselves and in their capacity to find viable ways to cope, persistence, a good self image, not to have feelings of resentment and to have a good humor. The supportive networks are present in all histories, making possible for the survival of the original family, and then her own survival and, as adults, they themselves have been the network to her sons, grandsons, godsons, neighbors.