Unemployment and resilience: The role of optimism in perception of lack of health

• Autor(a) principal: Victor, Patrícia Eusébio
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/18580
• topic: Unemployment; Optimism; Resilience; Well-being; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

This study was performed with the purpose of testing a relationship between optimism and perception of lack of health, as well as its mediation through resilience, in the context of recurrent unemployment. To reach this study goal, research was conducted by using face-to-face and online questionnaires, which were filled by 298 Portuguese unemployed individuals. The sample is composed by different genders, marital status and levels of education; and responses were collected in several different locations. Results confirm that optimistic individuals easily use challenges of being a high number of times unemployed to increase their repertoire of resilience, and by developing their alternatives to cope with adversity, they decrease their perception of lack of health. Furthermore, this study’s results showed that low optimism difficulted the transformation of unpleasant situations into resilient attitudes, which leads to a higher perception of lack of well-being. Practical implications are discussed by highlighting the urgency in developing differentiated interventions to act upon both types of traits.