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Why and How to Consider the Resilience of Individuals?

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Abstract

Any property that conveys resilience to a specific farm at a specific point in time might well be irrelevant at a later point in time when both the farm and the context will have changed. In this chapter, the principal author’s ontological and epistemological positions within the interpretative paradigm are described, and there is reflection on how these have influenced and underpinned the methodological approach. The emergence and evolution of this approach within the social sciences is also described, as it is an important element of both how the study was approached and why it is important. The methods used for data collection and analysis are described and the emergent research themes introduced.

That is the beginning of knowledge – the discovery of something we do not understand.

Frank Herbert (1981)

Keith Noble has contributed more to this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Phenomenography is a research method adapted for mapping the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive and understand various aspects of, and phenomena in, the world around them (Marton 1986, p. 31).

  2. 2.

    Phenomenography will lead to better understanding of the perceptions and experiences of a phenomenon, while phenomenology will lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon itself (Bowden 2000; Marton 1981).

  3. 3.

    Empirism, psychologism, materialism, idealism, objectivism, subjectivism or constructivism, those that stem from the dualism of an outer and an inner world (Dahlberg 2013, p. 2).

  4. 4.

    Hermeneutics was originally the practice of interpreting meaning within biblical text but has expanded to include interpretation of text in search of underlying socio-political meaning (Guest et al. 2012, p. 14).

  5. 5.

    Described by Smart (1976, p. 100) to determine if an Interpretative Social Science theory is true.

  6. 6.

    ‘Written texts and artifacts which, unlike the spoken word, endures physically and thus can be separated across space and time from its author, producer, or user; and so have to be interpreted without the benefit of indigenous commentary’ (Hodder 1994, p. 393).

  7. 7.

    In the social sciences, agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one’s experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in, and the position they are born into. Disagreement on the extent of one’s agency often causes conflict between parties; for example, between parents and children (Elder 1994; Taylor 1985).

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Noble, K., Dennis, T., Larkins, S. (2019). Why and How to Consider the Resilience of Individuals?. In: Agriculture and Resilience in Australia’s North. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8355-7_5

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