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The family’s resources buffer or moderate the impact of the stressor event on the family’s level of stress. Hansen (1965) uses the term vulnerability to denote the difference in families’ physical and emotional responses to stressful stimuli (Gore & Colten, 1991). This moderator denotes variation in a family’s ability to prevent a stressor event or change from creating disruptiveness in the system (Burr, 1973; Henry et al., 2015). When family members have sufficient and appropriate resources, they are less likely to view a stressful situation as problematic. McCubbin and Patterson (1985) defined resources as traits, characteristics, or abilities of (a) individual family members, (b) the family system, and (c) the community that can be used to meet the demands of a stressor event. Individual or personal resources include financial (economic well-being), educational (problem solving, information), health (physical and emotional well-being), and psychological resources which include self-esteem, optimism, sense of coherence, sense of mastery, and a positive family schema or ethnic identity (Everson, Darling, Herzog, Figley, & King, 2017; Garrard, Fennell, & Wilson, 2017; Lavee, 2013; McCubbin & McCubbin, 2013).

The term family system resources refers to internal attributes of the family unit that protect the family from the impact of stressors and facilitate family adaptation during family stress or crisis. Family cohesion (bonds of unity) and adaptability (ability to change) (Olson, Russell, & Sprenkle, 1979, 1983; Patterson, 2002) have received the most research attention (Lavee, 2013). These two dimensions are the major axes of the circumplex model (Olson et al., 1979). This model suggests that families who function moderately along the dimensions of cohesion and adaptability are likely to make a more successful adjustment to stress (Olson, Russell, & Sprenkle, 1980).

Community resources refer to those capabilities of people or institutions outside the family upon which the family can draw from to deal with stress (Boss, Bryant, & Mancini, 2017). Social support is one of the most important community resources, such as informal support from friends, neighbors and colleagues, as well as formal support from community institutions (Lavee, 2013). Social support may be viewed as informational in terms of facilitating problem solving and as tangible in the development of social contacts who provide help and assistance. In general, social support serves as a protector against the effects of stressors and promotes recovery from stress or crisis. Increasingly, the concept of community resources has been broadened to include the resources of cultural groups, for example, ethnic minority families (Emmen et al., 2013; Hill, 1999; McCubbin, Futrell, Thompson & Thompson, 1998; McCubbin, & McCubbin, 2013; Yeh et al., 2006) as well as those offered within established neighborhoods and communities (Distelberg & Taylor, 2015; Lum et al., 2016).