Community Resilience in Transitional Society: A Case Study from Central China

Bo Yang, International Business School Shaanxi Normal University
Marcus W. Feldman, Stanford University
Shuzhuo Li , Xi'an Jiaotong University

Social transition for rural communities in China has involved rapid changes due to urbanization, rural industrialization, and rural-urban migration. We introduce “community resilience”, an index that measures how a community can overcome social adversity and uncertainty, using a Chinese version of the perceived community resilience scale and data from a multilevel survey of two rural counties in central China. Latent profile analysis and a multilevel regression mixture model are employed to classify community resilience and to explore how the social-ecological system influences this classification. Community resilience is classified into “autonomous community”, “cooperative community”, and “authoritative community”. Rural residents perceive community resilience based on their individual features, which reflect the current social impacts on livelihoods. Social-ecological variables, including geographical features, financial status, social networks, and traditional culture, have significant effects on the categories of community resilience.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy