What matters most to the perception of community resilience in Romania?

Abstract

We aim to measure and explain the perception of community resilience in Romania. We use survey data from a country-representative sample of 1500 respondents. We rely on factor-based partial least squares path modeling to measure five reflective latent constructs from a CCRAM-type questionnaire. We use these constructs to extract a second-order formative latent construct representing an overall measure of community resilience. Next, we use three sub-dimensions of family resilience, along with individual resilience and several control variables to explain community resilience. Among the five sub-dimensions of the overall measure of community resilience, social trust exerts the highest contribution, followed by place attachment. The predictors of community resilience with the largest effect sizes are the three sub-dimensions of family resilience. The policies geared towards increasing community resilience might not be able to address the most important factors, at least in the case of Romania, because they pertain to informal group interaction, and lie outside the reach of formal administrative authority.