Resilience and vulnerability of a person in a community in the context of military events

Abstract

A full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine changes people’s behavior and determines the current person’s resilience/vulnerability in society. This paper aims to estimate individual resilience/vulnerability and its factors in the community during wartime. It used the online survey method based on Google Forms and online focus-group interviews during May-August 2022 at four territorial communities in Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv, and Sumy regions, which geographically represent the whole of Ukraine. A randomly selected 468 respondents were interviewed, including 139 internally displaced persons and refugees and 329 who did not consider themselves in any vulnerable category. The survey shows that according to the “Well-being and baseline status” factor, 66.3% of respondents confirmed an increase in their activity in response to the war. Along with a high level of trust in their family during wartime, indicators of social atomization (broken social ties, isolation of people from each other) are high. Thus, 37.4% of respondents noted that they rely only on themselves and solve their problems independently, without anyone’s help. Using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, it was found that the social resilience of the Ukrainian population is mainly based on individual resilience rather than on the resilience of mechanisms. For almost 50% of the respondents, there are manifestations of atomized sustainability and vulnerability, which increase the likelihood of post-traumatic stress disorder. Therefore, the control over disaster management processes should be based not only on data monitoring but also on training and innovativeness to increase social resilience.