Stories of resilience – rebuilding consumer identity after poverty

Despite the significance of resilience in consumer poverty research, current understanding is skewed towards contexts of downward mobility and research has neglected to explore what happens after consumers move out of a period of financial and identity strain. Employing a novel qualitative two-stage narrative approach, our study analyses autobiographies and interviews to reveal two distinct post-poverty resilience narrative pathways. First, redemptive resilience narratives positively reconstruct disruptive life events for consumer identity growth. Second, restorative resilience narratives negatively reconstruct disruptive life events for consumer identity reclamation. Our findings extend the literature on dynamic resilience trajectories and coping behaviours, highlighting how past disruption influences different types of resilience through identity reconstruction and lasting lifestyle alterations.