Study examines youth resiliency
In recent years the role of resiliency—an individual’s ability to overcome or "bounce back" from adversity—is emerging as a valuable framework to enhance understanding of effective prevention. The resiliency model shifts attention away from just analysing risk factors and moves it towards social and environmental conditions as well as personal traits that increase protection.
Led by researchers at Canada’s Dalhousie University, the International Resilience Project (IRP) is a collaborative, global project examining the aspects of young people’s lives that help them cope with the many challenges they face. The pilot phase of a comprehensive study by IRP was conducted in 11 countries on 5 continents, with participation from youth and adults who were interviewed and asked a series of common questions. The study identified the following resiliency factors:
Individual factors
- Assertiveness
- Ability to solve problems
- Self-awareness
- Empathy for others
- Having goals and aspirations
- Sense of humour
Relationship factors
- Presence of positive mentors and role models
- Perceived social support
- Appropriate emotional expression and parental monitoring within the family
- Peer group acceptance
Community contexts that provide:
- Avoidance of exposure to violence among family, community, and peers
- Government provision for children’s safety, recreation, housing, and jobs when older
- Access to school and education, information, and learning resources
- Safety and security
Cultural factors
- Tolerance of differing ideologies, beliefs
- Having a life philosophy
- Cultural and/or spiritual identification
- Being culturally grounded
You keep plugging away—that’s the way social change takes place. That’s the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.
Noam Chomsky
The findings from the IRP show resiliency is enhanced by different layers of our experience: the individual, relationship, community and cultural. Each layer interacts and collectively enhances or decreases resiliency depending on systems and supports. The findings from the study can be summarized as:
-
Resilience has both global and culturally/contextually specific aspects.
-
Aspects of resilience exert differing amounts of influence on a child’s life depending on the specific culture and context in which resilience is realized.
-
Aspects of children’s lives that contribute to resilience are related to one another in patterns that reflect a child’s culture and context.
-
How tensions between individuals and their cultures and contexts are resolved will affect the way aspects of resilience group together.
Learn more @ www.resilienceproject.org
