Strength in the Face of Adversity: Individual and Social Thriving

Inherent in any profound challenge is the potential for crisis or opportunity. This article focuses on the opportunities that challenge presents at the level of individuals, organizations, and nations: opportunities to move beyond recovery and to display thriving by using the challenge as an impetus for change leading to growth. A variety of individual and social resources hypothesized to promote thriving are explored with an eye toward identifying a set of conceptually meaningful categories for use in future theoretical development and empirical investigation.