Exploring Family Resilience: Experience of Chinese Families During COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract

Informed by the family resilience theories, the purpose of this paper is to examine the resilience of family during COVID-19 lockdown crisis in Nanjing, China. In particular, the challenges these families face, the coping strategies they use, the roles of each member plays, and the resources they have are analyzed within the framework of the theories. The interviewed families were recruited with non-probability purposive and snowball sampling strategies in a gated community in Nanjing. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted to all the family members, except those under 18, in a total of 11 families. The study finds that the fluid and dynamic family structures embedded in deeply-rooted kinship system and subsystem in everyday practice are useful and effective resources to help family members develop resilience against COVID-19 crisis. This paper advocates that more comparisons of cross-culture, cross-social categories and social status in different cities and countries can be further conducted to explore the particularity of how families develop their own family resilience to deal with the COVID-19 and/or other crises.