Poverty and family resilience in Belém-Pará

Abstract

Family resilience is a complex, multi-determined behavior caused by the inseparable action of risk and protection factors. The purpose of this paper is to associate aspects of family resilience with multiple dimensions of poverty through a quantitative, descriptive, correlative, exploratory study with a sample of 448 low-income families in thirteen Social Assistance Reference Centers in Belém, Pará. The instruments used in the study were the Family Resilience Profile Questionnaire, the Social and Demographic Inventory, and the Family Poverty Rate. The results state that the families are not living in extreme poverty; however, they still face adversities due to the poverty. A significant presence of women, where 90.6% of the participants were mothers living in a single-parent family, attests that women are still the part of the population most affected by poverty. Furthermore, the results showed that the higher the poverty level, the lower the family resilience, and aspects such as work, knowledge and human development, especially child development, are aspects that enhance family resources to face adversities.