This semester throughout Organizational Behavior my group and I researched Resilience. We read many articles on topics regarding resilience, in order to dive into our research process and gain a better understanding of the details and factors of resilience. As resilience can be a broad term, we had to pick a more niche topic to focus on for our specific project, which ended up being resilience and independence. Additionally, not only was this project research-intensive, but it also required us, students, to interview 5 individuals. The interviews helped further support our conclusion that resilience and independence go hand and hand together.
Independence was a theme that came up within our interviewee’s stories and was something we found in common between our interviewees overall. This was one of the main conclusions as to the stories our interviewees told us including topics of family relationships and struggles, fear as a motivator, and lastly youth experiences. We felt that each of these subcategories fell under the topic of independence. For example, in one of my interviews with my sister Jordy she said that, In the seventh grade, I tried out for the middle school soccer team, unfortunately, I got cut from that… that was really hard and upsetting for a 13-year-old at the time, to experience but luckily, it helped me keep my drive, I would still practice with my dad every day, when people would go to practice after school with the team.” This was a youth experience where my sister had to be independent and keep working towards her goals as an athlete. This experience ultimately contributed to her resilience but also a situation where she had to be resilient.
One thing that I learned throughout the course of this project is that solid research is an imperative component. As a group, we needed to gather solid information that aligned with our findings from the interviews. Furthermore, something we struggled with as a group was initially trying to code all our interviews together to find common threads to essentially form our project.
Overall, something that really stood out to me as a takeaway from this project and which something I find super meaningful is that, after hearing different stories from 5 different individuals, I have realized that we as a society all go through different experiences and have various backgrounds and lifestyles, which contribute to who we are and shape our abilities to be resilient and discover your own path.
