Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

216 Particular attention should be paid to explicit inclusion of marginalized people in resilience research and practice, including involvement in the more technical aspects of data collection. Current research practices routinely encourage underrepresentation of those termed hardest to reach and most in need. In our own exploration of the resilience literature, we found that children and young people with complex needs are unjustly underrepresented in study samples (Hart & Heaver, 2013; Hart et al., 2014). As discussed elsewhere (Hart & Heaver, 2013; Hart et al., 2014) the political economy of research, that is, academic capitalism (Barry, 2011), creates conditions which encourage researchers to focus on tame populations, people who will sit quietly and complete pen and paper or computer-based measures, with minimal supervision and in the fastest time. We know that competition between researchers to present the best value for money to funders is an issue here, having large sample sizes and including people with learning disabilities are not usually congruous, as we have found in our own projects. Furthermore, academic journals often expect similarly large sample sizes, so there is clearly some work to do for both funders and journal boards in encouraging more appropriate research participation. Resilience researchers and practitioners should be especially concerned about underrepresentation, as it is the people who are in most need of resilience-based interventions who are in danger of being systematically left out of the knowledge base because they may need additional support to participate. Challenging this state of affairs requires commitment from individual researchers and academic institutions to make emancipatory, resilient moves within research itself. Although we urge researchers to strive toward the inclusion of easy to ignore groups, and those who need additional support, there are steps that can be taken in the meantime to create pressure for change within research contexts. We can stop underrepresentation being a hidden problem, and improve the validity of the information we do have, by routinely including detailed demographic information about participants in our research. And, by justifying the use of unrepresentative samples, we can explicitly state decision-making processes, allowing these processes to be more carefully considered (Thimasarn-Anwar, Sanders, Munford, Jones, & Liebenberg, 2014). In our own research, young people with disabilities (physical, mental health, and learning) are integral members of our community of practice and work as Boingboing co-researchers (Hart, Griffiths, & Mena-Cormenzana, 2015). Measures The use of representative samples should be especially considered in the development of adversity and resilience measures. If disadvantaged groups are not included when measures are developed, this further perpetuates their exclusion from studies (Hart et al., 2014) and reduces validity. Making measures more accessible (e.g., easy read, symbol, or pictorial format), and ensuring they acquire information from children and young people who have difficulty compiling forms (e.g., read aloud or proxy completion), will aid inclusion. Resilience-focused items should extend beyond the individual to aspects of the person’s ecology, such as the social (e.g., family), institutional (e.g., school), and cultural and community contexts in which they live. Adversity measures should include questions designed to capture the types of inequalities that the person is facing. Resilience measures should attempt to capture emancipatory elements such as activism and advocacy, both in relation to self and others. We appreciate that this is hard in some contexts, but examples include whether participants take part in political activities, for example, voting, lobbying around inequalities, community advocacy; or whether the resilience program they attended had wider effects for their community, for example, raising awareness of mental health. Finally, cost-free, easily obtainable resilience measures are of the greatest benefit in more disadvantaged contexts, potentially increasing inclusion of disadvantaged people and communities. CONCLUSION Wider structural factors, such as political and economic dynamics, are largely neglected in the current models, research and practices of resilience-building for children and young people. This is partly due to the assumption that a focus on the individual and these wider levels is mutually exclusive. We challenge this assumption by uniting resilience research and practice development with a social justice approach. It is essential for the advancement of the field that researchers and practitioners acknowledge the wider political and economic context in which both the resilience models and resulting research and practice sit. Through a social justice lens, engagement with this wider context demands that those of us who don’t self-identify as disadvantaged take up our role as advocates and/or promote self-advocacy alongside disadvantaged, marginalized, and excluded children, young people, and families. It is essential that the resilience literature shifts debate on to look beyond the individual. We urge scholars to work with an inclusive and robust conceptualization of resilience that pays attention to the individual, societal, and environmental interactions simultaneously. We also ask researchers and practitioners to consider how they can make resilient moves within their own work which contribute toward systemic transformation and the reduction of inequalities. Moreover, working with and alongside individuals and groups facing disadvantage will deepen researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of their needs, those that can be met and those that cannot. Resilience research and practice has the potential to affect the wider adversity, and therefore inequalities, context with small resilient moves that set in motion chains of events. This not only raises the profile of and strengthens day-to-day research and practice, but it also encourages academics, practitioners, and policy makers to tackle systemic inequalities (Aranda & Hart, 2014). Key here are the strategic plans and daily practices of research funders. Boingboing has been active in trying to shape these in a context where research