Resilience Solutions Group: John Hall and Alex Zautra
John Hall and Alex Zautra study a question that is as old as the book of Job: How do people rebound after life breaks their stride with a destabilizing setback such as physical disability, chronic illness or the loss of a loved one?
“Our goals, objectives and hopes are challenged from time to time by some pretty severe events that can interrupt the flow of life and the future that a person envisions for himself,” says Alex Zautra, an ASU professor of psychology.
“Part of resilience is sustaining one’s interests, motivation, and direction. It’s also the ability to bounce back, regain one’s momentum and find one’s footing after having lost it,” he says. “Resilience is measured by the speed and fullness of the recovery from difficulties.”
Hall and Zautra are members of a group of ASU psychologists and social scientists known as the Resilience Solutions Group (RSG). Zautra cofounded the RSG in 2002 with Hall, a public policy professor in the School of Public Affairs. At the time, Zautra was studying how older adults survived the crippling pain of arthritis. Specifically, he looked at how these people found a way to manage their pain effectively without sacrificing pleasure, productivity and meaning in their lives.
During those studies, Zautra came across a sobering report that Hall had just published entitled “Coming of Age.” Hall’s study challenged Arizona’s readiness to handle the coming demographic bulge in its elderly population. The two met to discuss their mutual interests.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What is the best sort of project or set of projects that could be done now to help prepare people to sustain their quality of life as they age?’ Together we came up with the theme of resilience,” Zautra says.
Since then, RSG researchers have tackled a host of challenging social issues from rethinking the training of volunteer caregivers who work with dying elders in hospice environments to studying the resourceful ways in which pregnant women on public assistance are able to navigate a complicated medical system.
In 2005, the National Institute on Aging awarded the ASU group a $2.2 million grant. The plan is to study an ethnically diverse group of 800 baby boomers between the ages of 45 and 65 in the Phoenix metro area. The RSG’s goal is to determine what factors contribute to and enhance resiliency. This capacity for self-righting has been shown to be vital in sustaining both physical health and emotional well-being.
Building resilience, however, is not a solo undertaking. As Hall points out, “Resilience is not something you do alone. Social cohesion is vital to resilience. People need to feel that they’re a part of something larger rather than just atoms in the universe.” Facilities, programs and activities on the community level, he says, all contribute to helping people rebound from adverse events. It can be something as simple as knowing that you can count on your neighbors to help in an emergency. Or it might involve redesigning a community’s infrastructure in order to make it more navigable for elder residents.
InnovationSpace students will have a chance to road test some of the RSG’s ideas in the 2007-2008 program. Six of the nine student teams are charged with developing product concepts that improve the function of healing environments as well as help elders cope with a trio of common maladies including dementia, arthritis and social isolation. Thanks to a $20,000 grant from ASU’s Student Pathways program, Hall and Zautra will join the crossdisciplinary InnovationSpace faculty for two semesters. They will deliver lectures on some of the latest resilience research as well as stress the resilience perspective throughout the concept development and design phases. Rather than simply search for problems in need of solutions, Zautra and Hall will urge student teams to use insights from resilience research to design products, environments and systems that “recognize the strengths and acknowledge the capacities of the people you’re working with.”
“One developmental psychologist called resilience ‘the ordinary miracles of people,’” Zautra adds. “We need to have our finger on the pulse of those natural capacities.”
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