Investigating resilience in the childcare context through the agent-based paradigm

Abstract

Resilience in child protection professional teams (CPP) involves complex interactions at the individual, team and organizational levels. Understanding these multiscale, multimodal dynamics is critical to improving the resilience of CPP teams under enormous stress due to factors such as high work demands, pandemics, and geopolitical events, etc. While resilience has been considered a systemic phenomenon, the dynamic interactions between the individual, team, and organization; how they inform resilience; and how they adapt in the face of adversity remains to be adequately formalized. This paper explores the study of the complex dynamics of team resilience in the context of CPP and how agent-based modelling (ABM) can be used to systematically investigate resilience. Specifically, we explore the attributes of ABM that make it ideal to capturing resilience, outline the steps the uninitiated can take to adopt ABM, and showcase investigations that have used ABM in the childcare and resilience context. This review highlights the potential of ABM in modelling the multifaceted nature of team resilience, predicting outcomes and developing strategies that are critical to long-term success and well-being in dynamic and challenging environments.