To date, methods for assessing community resilience have focused predominantly on disaster recovery. Those that do focus on broader social-ecological and psychological contexts tend to be qualitative and have not been validated at the community scale. This situation reveals a need for quantitative measurement tools for assessing community resilience to slow-moving change such as rural depopulation or climate change. Our research provides a proof of concept across two diverse contexts, New Zealand and Vermont, USA, that community resilience can be quantified and broken down into dimensions of resilience. Using mixed methods, we assessed how eight communities across two countries perceive resilience and compared their perceptions with indicators of resilience in the form of official statistics. Vermonters generally perceived their communities as more resilient than did New Zealanders, and reported different dimensions of resilience as drivers of overall perceptions of resilience. Although institutional resilience was a driver of overall resilience in both countries, social and cultural dimensions of resilience were also drivers in New Zealand, whereas economic and environmental dimensions were drivers of overall resilience in Vermont. Resilience indicators were found to be weakly related or unrelated to community perceptions of resilience. This result suggests that the proposed method for measuring resilience can be used across contexts, but that there is not one type of resilience that is the key to higher levels of overall resilience. It also suggests that the two proxy measures of resilience, i.e., community perceptions and indicators, do not provide a consistent picture of resilience, raising the question of which is a more accurate measure.

中文翻译：

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衡量农村社区的复原力：新西兰和美国佛蒙特州的案例研究

迄今为止，评估社区弹性的方法主要集中在灾难恢复上。那些确实关注更广泛的社会生态和心理环境的人往往是定性的，并且尚未在社区范围内得到验证。这种情况表明需要使用定量测量工具来评估社区对诸如农村人口减少或气候变化等缓慢变化的适应能力。我们的研究提供了在新西兰和美国佛蒙特州这两个不同背景下的概念证明，即社区的复原力可以量化并分解为复原力的各个维度。我们使用混合方法评估了两个国家的八个社区如何感知弹性，并将其看法与官方统计数据中的弹性指标进行了比较。佛蒙特州人普遍认为自己的社区比新西兰人更具韧性，并报告了不同程度的韧性，这是总体上对韧性的看法的驱动力。尽管机构弹性是两国的总体弹性的驱动力，但韧性的社会和文化层面也是新西兰的动力，而经济和环境维度是佛蒙特州整体弹性的动力。发现复原力指标与社区对复原力的认识弱相关或无关。该结果表明，所提出的弹性测量方法可以在各种情况下使用，但是没有一种弹性是提高整体弹性水平的关键。这也表明了两种抵御能力的替代指标，即