Resilience is a process and opportunity, not something children have or don’t have

Professor Ramona Alaggia, University of Toronto

Professor Ramona Alaggia is a trauma and resilience researcher in social work at the University of Toronto. Her focus of study is in child sexual abuse disclosures, children exposed to intimate partner violence and trauma informed practice. She teaches child and family assessment and treatment and multi-level interventions in the area of violence against women and children.

Studying resilience with children and adults exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) has taken me on a journey that has resulted in a fundamental shift in how I do research, teach and counsel clients. This has been significant in my understanding of adversity, trauma and the profound role of resilience.

When I initially encountered the term resilience I approached it with skepticism and questions. Was it a “feel good” term to minimize the fall-out from very big problems in people’s lives? Or a tool used by governments to scale back on service funding using platitudes like kids are resilient; they’ll be fine; they’ll bounce back - which has not been my experience with highly vulnerable children.

Fostering resilience is a concerted effort that needs to be intentionally built into programming.

Is resilience something people simply have or don’t have with very little in between?  Up until recently, the research literature focused largely on individual characteristics for explaining why some people are more resilient than others. These identified characteristics are often related to personality traits - including intelligence, easy temperament, and extroversion for example - traits that appear from birth.

Is resilience a state or a trait? 

This then led me to take a deeper dive into writings on this topic, bringing me to the many debates as to whether resilience is a trait or state. These conceptual debates dominated the literature for a long time and large international conferences have been held to discuss, define and sort out this elusive concept. It became clear to me, though, that these debates were more about inter-disciplinary orientations divided into camps of individual or environmental stances.   

Resilience is a process. Not a singular event or state of being, but an active process of fostering resilience over the life course. 

As a social worker I have landed on an interactive explanation of resilience. The conditions for fostering resilience, from this perspective, requires personal factors and environmental influences to come together, in the right combination.

In my research I interviewed adult survivors exposed to intimate partner violence in their childhoods, and collected data using resilience measures from mothers and children exposed to intimate partner violence. This was conducted alongside longitudinal data on protective factors from a large scale Canadian study: the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). From this work, I have come to the conclusion that a person-in-environment/ecological  framework best helps to elucidate factors and processes contributing to resilient outcomes.

A person-in-environment/ecological lens is needed for resilience informed practice.

 In Canada we subscribe to an ecological approach for many social issues and troubles. My research with IPV exposed children and youth underscores the need for a person-in-environment/ecological approach. Individual characteristics alone are not enough to carry children through adversity. Inter-personal factors such as secure attachments, safe relationships and cohesive family support, and contextual influences such as safe neighbourhoods, supportive resources and school connectedness are all required to foster resilience - both as preventive measures and also for those children who show vulnerabilities and end up in social services for intervention. As well, socio-political forces promoting child and family friendly policies, pre-and postnatal care, affordable child care, access to high quality education and after school supports and activities, and funding for sports and arts programs are all important parts of the equation.

Kids cannot be resilient on their own. The important people in their lives - their families, cultural supports, their networks of positive peers, and well-resourced neighbourhoods - are all part of the picture of fostering resilience.

Programming needs to be resilience informed. 

Because resilience has only recently come across our radars, as helping professionals providing services children who display vulnerabilities in the face of adversity, we need to take stock and inventory of how resilience informed these services actually are. Are protective factors, strengths and potential sources of resilience identified at intake or through the assessment process?  Are resilience based goals well-articulated in treatment planning? Are these clearly spelled out and measurable? 

For ideas on how to make your program resilience informed please visit www.makeresiliencematter.ca for further research findings and reports, tools, case studies and podcasts to support your practice and programming.

ResiliencebyDesign Research Innovation Lab

In this blog, we hear about the work of ResiliencebyDesign Research Innovation Lab, an interdisciplinary team of researchers committed to using applied, participatory research with young people. 

For more information about ResiliencebyDesign, their vision and projects, visit their website: http://resiliencebydesign.com or check out the overview video here (3 min)   https://vimeo.com/263796486

Originally posted 22 February 2019: 
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/CRFRresilience/2019/02/22/resiliencebydesign-research-innovation-lab/

Introduction 

“Where we conduct research as a method of moving hearts and minds to generate conversations that matter and lead to action”

The interdisciplinary ResiliencebyDesign (RbD) team is committed to applied, participatory research with youth to address the complex and interrelated problems of disasters, climate change, and conflict. Our projects combine capacity building with a range of research methodologies (e.g., arts-based, participatory video, digital storytelling, surveys). We believe in the potential of young people as resilience leaders and change makers. In partnership with youth, we use creative process, innovation and research to explore, connect, and seed new ideas and social change. Our goal is to develop and implement strategies, practices, and policies that improve local, national, and international disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

“It takes away this whole top down approach and it starts with participants and it works with participants to understand what they want to do and what their experiences are”

Creative Action Research Methodology and Process 

“It is the deep potential of research to be transformative in and of itself as a process when you can build in and incorporate capacity building and creatively understand what research is”

Creative Action Research (CAR) combines participatory action research, visual and other arts-based research methodologies, and social innovation processes with participants and foregrounds the potential of creative process as a transformative tool in research. This approach combines visual storytelling, arts-based methodologies, capacity and skill-building, and social innovation within the research process to explore key research questions with participants. The CAR process is grounded in collaboration, critical reflection, and creative problem-solving and reflects a commitment to empowerment, action, and knowledge mobilization within and beyond research communities.

Our work is strength-based, centering on resilience as a process and our belief that the journey is as important as the destination. We combine research activities with skill and capacity building in areas of interest to participating youth (e.g., leadership, critical thinking, research, community engagement, social innovation processes), and work to generate and support effective youth-adult partnerships (YAPs). We are committed to effecting changes in how youth engage in policy and decisions that affect them and to co-creating opportunities with youth at local, regional, and national levels.

“Trust in the process: understand it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be complicated, and that is half the fun”

Data generation methods are designed to be creative and experiential, including methods such as PhotoVoice (Baker & Wang, 2006), digital stories (Fletcher & Mullett 2015), and participatory video (Plush 2016). These and other arts-based methods enhance critical reflection, challenge routine thinking, and facilitate the development of creative problem solving skills (Percy-Smith & Burns, 2013). They also emphasize empowerment and action (Conrad, 2004), and support knowledge mobilization (Diamond & Mullen, 1999; O’Donoghue, 2009).

“It actually allows for work to be meaningful not just this creation of publication or good work that we can read but actually changes lives”

Quality Youth Engagement

"And then how can we embed creative process in it and develop a process that actually reflects young people?  What do they need?  What do they experience?  What processes are going to support them to become leaders?" 

Youth participating in a Creative Action Research Wellbeing Jenga activity as part of their Resilience Leadership Research Skills Certificate with the ResiliencebyDesign Lab Team, Alberta, Canada 

Various child participation and youth engagement theories and typologies have been developed (e.g. Lundy 2007, Shier, 2001; Thomas, 2007; Wong, Zimmerman & Parker, 2010) that generally coalesce around five core principles as outlined by Frank (2006): “(1) give youth responsibility and voice; (2) build youth capacities; (3) encourage youthful styles of working; (4) involve adults throughout the process; and (5) adapt the sociopolitical context.” This approach to youth engagement emphasizes the need for YAPs that acknowledge a mutuality of concerns and benefits wherein “[a]dults look to youth to provide legitimacy, on the ground knowledge and perspective, and cause-based passion” while youth want and expect support in the form of coaching, dialogue, and connections to resources and community leaders (Camino & Zeldin, 2002). YAPs encourage shared ownership in decision-making processes and the success and failure of the outcomes. For YAPs to succeed, both youth and adults require skills and knowledge that support sustained engagement and successful group dynamics (e.g., trust and team building, process facilitation, project management, leadership). To spark meaningful youth engagement and leadership to address complex issues requires transformative learning opportunities that support “a consciousness for critical learning and action, not only as citizens, but also as active agents of change in developing more sustainable futures” (Percy-Smith & Burns, 2013, p. 325). Percy-Smith and Burns (2013) and other transformative learning theorists (e.g., Mezirow, 1997) argue that to support young people understanding and addressing global dilemmas requires experiential, transformative learning approaches.

Gen Z and Climate Change is a current project exploring youth engagement in climate change action and disaster risk reduction. We are working to explore what we can learn from youth (ages 15-24) about what they experience as supporting (i.e., drivers) or impeding (i.e., barriers) their engagement in addressing these complex issues. This project is also empowering the youth involved to build from the barriers and drivers they have identified to develop a strategy for enhancing youth awareness and understanding of climate change and disaster risk reduction, contributing to their engagement as stakeholders and agents of change these spaces.  

The RbD Lab has been working on a framework for youth engagement in the context of disaster recovery, disaster risk reduction and resilience building. The RbD Lab 4-P Framework emphasizes a youth-centric approach to youth engagement that is grounded in culture and context, and that emphasizes the value of inclusive, creative, and empowering processes to support transformative learning and action. It also recognizes the need to consider People, Place, and Purpose in the design and implementation of youth engagement strategies and actions. This framework is designed to emphasize: (1) the importance of knowledge co-production between youth and adult stakeholders (van Kerkhoff & Lebel, 2006); (2) triple loop learning (Peschl, 2007) that generates an understanding and questioning of the underlying social structures, dominant values and other constructs inherent in complex issues; (3) critical thinking and systems change thinking; and (4) skill development in creative thinking, improvisation and innovation. These characteristics of transformative learning are at the heart of social innovation processes and labs.

Young people, aged 10–24, represent 1.8 billion people, approximately 25 percent of the world’s population, the largest cohort of young people in our collective history (UN, 2018). This generation includes young leaders with ambition, ingenuity, and potential address these global challenges and build more resilient futures. Although historically overlooked and perceived as both vulnerable in the face of disasters and climate change (Mitchell, Tanner & Haynes, 2009), and at high risk in the context of human insecurity, young people are both willing and able to contribute to establishing more resilient communities (Peek, 2008). Furthermore, youth are less habitual problem-solvers, more willing to take risks, early adopters of technology and innovation, and have a creative, vibrant energy that can be harnessed for social change. To address the current realities of climate change and disasters, and the uncertain future that awaits young people, requires active and collaborative engagement with young people.

Project Examples:

The RbD lab has been actively developing, applying, and refining the above principles since its inception. Below are a few of our more recent projects.

The “Youth Voices Rising: Recovery & Resilience in Wood Buffalo” project recognizes the critical role of youth in their communities and aims to strengthen youth engagement and decision-making influence in the aftermath of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire disaster recovery efforts in Northern Alberta. YVR is working with young people (age 14-24) and youth-centred organizations through a Creative Action Research process supported by social media, creative arts and visual storytelling. The project focuses on learning from and empowering youth affected by the wildfire disaster. For instance, the RbD Lab ran the youth-driven, community-wide #youthvoiceswb campaign in 2017 on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram &Twitter that compelled more than 350 youth to creatively answer the question “What would you do to make your community better?” Their answers are connecting to action on issues they identified as important to them: transportation, education, volunteerism, health & wellbeing and participation & activities (view the report at www.resiliencebydesign.com/youthvoiceswb.)

The Youth Creating Disaster Recovery & Resilience (YCDR­2) was a cross-border initiative aimed at learning from and with disaster-affected youth aged 13-22 in the communities of Joplin, Missouri, in the United States, and Slave Lake, Calgary and High River, Alberta, in Canada. The YCDR2 project used flexible, youth-centric, arts-based research workshops to learn from and foster the inclusion of young people as active and able contributors to disaster recovery and resilience. The project has contributed to a more refined understanding of what places, spaces, people, and activities youth perceive as supportive of their recovery from disasters. It also informs knowledge and practice of research with youth in the post-disaster recovery space and the challenges and opportunities of establishing youth-community-academic partnerships.

Dr. Robin Cox, Laura H. V. Wright, Tiffany Hill, Dr. Tamara Plush, Dr. Sarah Fletcher, Nigel Deans  Contact us at: resiliencebydesign@royalroads.ca

Learn more about the RbD Lab and stay up-to-date

Website:  http://resiliencebydesign.com/  Twitter:  https://twitter.com/ResiliencebyD

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResiliencebyDesignlab/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resiliencebydesignlab/

References

Baker, T. A., & Wang, C. C. (2006). Photovoice: Use of a participatory action research method to explore the chronic pain experience in older adults. Qualitative health research, 16(10), 1405-1413.

Camino, L., & Zeldin, S. (2002). From periphery to center: Pathways for youth civic engagement in the day-to-day life of communities. Applied Developmental Science, 6(4), 213-220.

Conrad, D. (2004). Popular theatre: Empowering pedagogy for youth. Youth Theatre Journal, 18(1), 87-106

Diamond, C. T. P., & Mullen, C. A. (1999). The postmodern educator. Arts-based inquiries and teacher development. New York: Peter Lang.

Engeström, Y., Miettinen, R., & Punamäki, R. L. (Eds.). (1999). Perspectives on activity theory. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Lundy, L. (2007). ‘Voice’is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British educational research journal, 33(6), 927-942.

Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, (74), 5-12.

Mitchell, T., Tanner, T., & Haynes, K. (2009). Children as agents of change for DRR: Lessons from El Salvador and Philippines. Brighton: Children in a Changing Climate and International Development Studies.

O'Donoghue, P. (2009). Research methods for sports performance analysis. Routledge: London.

Peek, L. (2008). Children and disasters: Understanding vulnerability, developing capacities, and promoting resilience—An introduction. Children Youth and Environments, 18(1), 1-29.

Percy-Smith, B., & Burns, D. (2013). Exploring the role of children and young people as agents of change in sustainable community development. Local Environment, 18(3), 323-339.

Peschl, M. F. (2007). Triple-loop learning as foundation for profound change, individual cultivation, and radical innovation. Construction processes beyond scientific and rational knowledge. Constructivist Foundations, 2(2-3), 136-145.

Plush, T. (2016). We’ve raised their voice. Is anyone listening? Participatory video practitioners and valued citizen voice in international development contexts. PhD Thesis. University of Queensland, Australia.

Shier, H. (2001). Pathways to participation: Openings, opportunities and obligations. Children & Society, 15(2), 107-117.

Thomas, N. (2007). Towards a theory of children's participation. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 15(2), 199.

Van Kerkhoff, L., & Lebel, L. (2006). Linking knowledge and action for sustainable development. Annual review of environment and resources, 31.

Wong, N. T., Zimmerman, M. A., & Parker, E. A. (2010). A typology of youth participation and empowerment for child and adolescent health promotion. American Journal of Community Psychology, 46(1-2), 100-114.

Making Scotland an ACE informed nation: continuing the conversation - an event summary

CRFR co-director Dr Emma Davidson summarises the key themes emerging from our recent seminar reflecting on the emergent ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and resilience agenda in Scotland.

We began a conversation on ACEs and resilience in December 2017 at the seminar, ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’, where Dr Eric Carlin and myself voiced our concerns that the dominant narrative on resilience could obscure inequalities; penalising individuals by making them responsible for their own wellbeing. Since then, we have witnessed the mounting influence of ACE and resilience-focused policy in Scotland. It is now even more important to provide a space in which popular rhetoric on ACEs and resilience can be constructively and respectfully critiqued.

Our event on 6^th November 2018 aimed to reignite that process. We welcomed three speakers: Dr Amy Chandler, Dr Cara Blaisdell and Laura Wright, each of whom talked from their perspective of their own field of research.

Amy’s presentation (which you can watch here) examined the potentially counter-productive ways ACEs are used in research on suicide and self-harm. Early experiences, Amy noted, are undeniably important in shaping later risks of, or experiences with, suicide and self-harm. However, there is a tendency to rely on a mechanical or ‘addictive’ analysis, with a correlation drawn between early adversity and later problems. The work of explaining what these correlations actually mean, or understanding the mechanisms behind them, are less well developed. Drawing on her own research, Amy highlighted that this focus can mean that interpretation and meaning is omitted – what do adverse experiences mean and feel like to different people, at different times? And how are social and political conditions implicated in this? Also absent, Amy suggested, is the role of agency. The popular narrative of resilience plays into the long standing stigmatisation of mental health problems as being associated with weakness. This way of thinking about resilience implies that those experiencing self-harm and suicide are not resilient.  The reverse can in fact be true, with the practice of self-harm being evidence of extreme resilience in extreme circumstances.

Dr Cara Blaisdell’s work picked up on this critique within an early years setting (read Cara’s new blog here). She highlighted the potential for the ACE agenda in Scotland to reinforce what Tuck (2009) refers to as a ‘damage narrative’. Rather than holding those in power to account, these narratives can reinforce particular ideas about children and society: where the ‘poor’ child is a site of damage to self and society; where professional labels children and seek to ‘fix’ them; and where structures of oppression remain unchallenged and unchanged. Cara’s made the acute observation ‘what you focus on is what grows’. This is not a denial that bad things happen, but rather an acknowledgement that deficit based models can label, provoke normative ideas (of family, of parenting, of childhood). Ultimately deficit models stigmatise, and they leave little room for the complex meaning making emphasised by Amy as being so crucial.

Our final speaker was Laura Wright who raised what is an under-acknowledged issue within ACEs – and that is the role and status of children’s rights. Scotland is, noted Laura, a country recognised as a global leader in children’s meaningful participation. This work is supported by multiple organisations, initiatives (we are now coming to the end of the Year of Youth People) and legislation (i.e. Children and Young People (Scotland_ Act 2014). A tension, nonetheless, remains between participation and protectionism – with the latter superseding the former. The implications of this, argues Laura, requires exploration. At present, children and young people have not been given the opportunity to meaningfully participate in discussions about what is included or excluded from the list of ‘adverse childhood experiences’. Indeed, at an individual level, adults are completing checklists for children and young people, and using this to make decisions about possible interventions. What, asked Laura, does such an approach look like, and how it is given meaning by children and young people? Critically, how can a plan designed to be child-centred, like Getting it Right for Every Child, better engage children and young people in active conversations about their own well-being?

There is – as Laura concluded – no magic bullet. However, the speakers agreed that the way forward is not simply to shift from asking ‘what’s wrong with you’, to ‘what happened to you’. Rather, what is required is a move towards a strengths approach which asks what is right with you, your family, your community and your society. On a practical and pragmatic note, more reflection and time needs to be spent on how complex ideas – such as meaning, context and interpretation – be meaningfully incorporated in institutional structures and practices already under incredible pressure.

We intend to continue these conversations and look forward to seeing you at our forthcoming events. There are four more seminars planned for 2019. Each will consider ACEs and resilience through a different conceptual lens. These are: 

·        ACEs and foetal & infant development

·        ACEs, resilience and gender

·        Resilience in the Majority World

·        ACEs and resilience in Scottish schools

We will be announcing dates for these seminars in the New Year. Please subscribe to the CRFR website for updates on this, and CRFR’s other events and research activities.

Further links

Drs Emma Davidson and Eric Carlin reflect on their CRFR Informal Seminar ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’.
Resilience – continuing the conversation

CRFR Associate PhD student Ariane Critchley provides her thoughts on resilience in response to the recent CRFR Seminar ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’ given by Eric Carlin and Emma Davidson.
How resilient do we want our children and young people to be?

Dr Caralyn Blaisdell from the University of Strathclyde continues our discussion on the theme of resilience and how this term is being used, with specific reference to early years.  
Resilience in early years – continuing the conversation

ACE Awareness,damage narratives and social justice in early years practice: personal andprofessional reflections

Laura Wright, University of Edinburgh talks about engaging children in the ACE agenda.

ACE Aware Nation: Engaging Children in the Conversation

ACE Awareness, damage narratives and social justice in early years practice: personal and professional reflections

Dr Caralyn Blaisdell from the University of Strathclyde continues our discussion on the theme of resilience and how this term is being used, with specific reference to early years. 

As an experienced practitioner, researcher and lecturer specializing in early childhood education, I have had a mixed reaction to the recent push for being ACE Aware. Discussions about love, kindness and empathy are very welcome and needed. At Strathclyde, our students discuss how their settings are moving away from punitive practices, toward a deeper culture of listening to children and young people and reflecting on relationships of power. There seems to be a real interest in recognising and remedying injustice and changing practices within systems. There has been increasing discussion of children’s rights within ACE Awareness, which is also very welcome and needed in early years.

At the same time, there is a danger that ACE Awareness is reinforcing damage narratives (Tuck 2009) and deficit thinking about young children and families:

•        The (poor) child and family as a site of damage to self and society

•        Labelling—professionals telling people what they are

•        Hero worship--the valiant professional who swoops in to fix the individual

•        Oppressive structures and behaviours remain unchanged 

(Quarrell and Davis 2018)

This vision of the heroic professional is not new or revolutionary in early years—it is just more of the same. Early years education is plagued by deterministic and simplistic views of human development—for example, the belief that the pattern for our lives is set by three years old. This belief easily leads to aggressive diagnosing of difference and labelling of young children. Alternative visions for early childhood education include celebration of difference as a source of strength, anti-bias work, political action, and walking alongside children and families to dream equitable worlds into reality (RECE, 2014).

In the CRFR seminar, we heard from audience members who felt curiosity, hesitance, inspiration and anger about ACE Awareness. Calls to dismiss or even condemn those who aren’t sure about ACE Awareness, or to accuse people of not caring about children or even doing more harm to children by questioning ACEs, are profoundly unhelpful and disheartening. In early years, ACE Awareness could potentially help challenge oppressive practices, recognise children and families’ own voices about their lives, disrupt power dynamics in institutional settings, and inform political education and action. However, ACE Awareness also has the potential to reinforce damage-based thinking, paternalistic practices and professional ego. If we choose to accept ACE Awareness, we must see it as only one facet of the intellectual and moral challenges of early childhood work. We must insist on continuing to ask uncomfortable questions about who benefits from this awareness.

To view her presentation from seminar on 6 November 2018, click the link below
http://www.crfr.ac.uk/assets/Ace-Aware_Cara-Blaisdell-1.pdf

How resilient do we want our children and young people to be?

In a follow-up post, CRFR Associate PhD student Ariane Critchley provides her thoughts on resilience in response to the recent CRFR Seminar ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’ given by Eric Carlin and Emma Davidson.


As a social worker I was fortunate to meet a number of children and young people who I would describe as ‘resilient’. The work of Gilligan (2001) was highly influential on my practice and I considered ways in which I might foster resilience in the children I worked with, particularly those children to whom we owed corporate parenting responsibilities, by virtue of their status as ‘looked after’. In my view, it makes sense to talk of ‘resilience’ in the context of frontline social work, where practitioners encounter young people who have suffered 'extraordinary vulnerability’ (Brownlie, 2014: 195) through their experiences of early trauma, their separation from family of origin, and experiences of an imperfect care system with multiple moves of home and school. Should young people flourish through such extremes of early adversity, aren’t we right to think of them as resilient?

I would argue that in this context, ‘resilient’ is exactly how we should describe the ongoing achievement that individual children make by not only surviving serious challenges, but somehow finding a way to grow and to thrive. And the ‘somehow’ here is crucial. Acknowledging Carlin & Davidson’s challenge, that resilience risks that we ‘prioritise external and normative judgements about individuals’ characteristics and behaviours and the adversities they are deemed to have overcome’ (Ungar, 2005), I wish to suggest that resilience as properly understood is an ecological and ‘relational’ quality (Bondi et al. 2007). We can only be resilient to the challenges we face through interaction with the internal and external factors that make up our life world. For example, our health, the people who surround us, the socio-economic context we live in, and the resources to which we have access. Resilience then, is not a ‘characteristic’ so much as a process.

Which is why, as social workers, we feel we can contribute to an individual child or young person’s overall ‘resilience’. However, this does not translate into a policy aspiration that all children and young people should be resilient. Listening to the seminar last week, what struck me was the way that the universal application of concepts such as ‘resilience’ can be dangerous. When youth policy suggests through GIRFEC that all Scottish children should be encouraged to be resilient we risk a backwards misapplication, which seems to demand that children and young people do their best with the cards they are dealt rather than our society finding them a better hand.

In their study of the operationalisation of resilience in practice, Daniel et al. cautioned that, ‘policy documents are increasingly referring to the promotion of resilience as an aim – it is important that such documents set out their operational definitions (Daniel et al., 2009)’. Viewing resilience ‘as an aim’ introduces the great danger that this seminar warned of; we might expect that children and young people encountering significant difficulty should simply become more resilient, flipping resilience on its head in a way that demands individual overcoming, not structural equalising. If resilience is understood as a dynamic process that occurs in conditions of adversity, the aim of public policy should surely be to challenge and reduce the social and material conditions in which children can truly be described as ‘resilient’, to decrease the very circumstances in which resilience can flourish.

Ariane Critchley is a qualified social worker and researcher with a range of interests across social work and public health. Ariane is based at the University of Edinburgh where she is writing up her ESRC funded PhD on pre-birth child protection, examining the complexities of applying child protection processes to unborn children and the experiences of practitioners and of expectant families. Ariane has contributed to Scottish Government publications on maternity care and is currently working with Social Work Scotland on finding evidence of good practice in the implementation of self-directed support in Scotland.


References


Bondi, L., Davidson, J. and Smith, M. (2007), ‘Geography’s ‘Emotional Turn’’, Chapter 1 in Davidson, J. Bondi, L. and Smith, M. (2007), Emotional Geographies, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.

Brownlie, J. (2014), Ordinary Relationships. A Sociological Study of Emotions, Reflexivity and Culture, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

 Daniel, B, Vincent, S, Farrell, E & Amey, F (2009), 'How is the concept of resilience operationalised in practice with vulnerable children?' International Journal of Child and Family Welfare, vol. 12 (1): 2-21.

Gilligan, R. (2001), Promoting resilience : a resource guide on working with children in the care system, London: British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering (BAAF).

Ungar, M. (2005) ‘Introduction: Resilience across cultures and contexts’, in Handbook for working with children and youth. London: Sage.

Resilience – continuing the conversation

Emma Davidson and Eric Carlin reflect on their recent CRFR Informal Seminar

It’s not a surprise that our seminar, ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’, received such interest. In recent years, fostering resilience has become a central dimension not only of early years, education and youth policy, but wider social policy and practice. The concept has, arguably, come from a sensible place: research that has sought to understand why, and in what circumstances, some individuals respond positively to adversity, and others do not. Our wariness, possibly scepticism, is about how resilience has been endorsed and appropriated by the state, distorting the policy focus away from the need for structural changes to reduce entrenched long-term and complex inequalities across populations and instead focussing on ‘steeling’ young people to bounce back from adversities that are assumed to be unavoidable.

 As we highlighted at the seminar, criticism of resilience projects has focused on their prioritisation of understanding and influencing individual behaviours, reducing risk factors for individuals and, in turn, neglecting social and structural explanations failure. Resilience based interventions are evolving, and a body of work is adopting a socio-ecological model which takes account of cultural contexts (see Hart et al 2016 or Ungar, M 2008). However, the psychoanalytical tradition from which resilience has developed dominates, with its focus on psychological dispositions and personality traits of individuals as ‘protective factors’. We are also troubled that our understandings of resilience are, to a great extent, being ‘imported’ from other social and cultural contexts, and we note the growth of a commercial industry of facilitators, consultants and trainers to support the policy drift towards resilience.

Of course, we are not suggesting that work on young people’s self-esteem, confidence and mental well-being is not important. However, we would argue that there is a need to stop and reflect – to think critically about how we are defining and operationalising resilience; to examine the evidence on resilience within our local contexts; to consider whether resilience is the outcome desired for your project; and to campaign for effective policies that can reduce unnecessary disadvantages.

Our final question is a bigger one – and that is whether the resilience framework is actually fit for purpose? Can a resilience framework transform fundamental inequalities marginalising young people, such as inequity in the education system, access to housing and welfare and precarious employment? Is this focus on ‘steeling’ young people - making them stronger and more resistant to adversity, and personally responsible for ‘success’ or ‘failure’ - socially just? This question is all the more potent in a climate of austerity, where many adversities facing young people cannot be considered a consequence of their own deficits.

These are questions, and conversations, we would like to continue. Follow this blog for ongoing debate and an announcement about a future seminar to continue the discussions.


Dr Emma Davidson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Sociology, based at the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships. Her ongoing research is exploring the social and community role of public libraries in Scotland (https://anewpage.org).

Dr Eric Carlin is a Teaching Fellow in the Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics and is the Director of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP) based at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
References

Hart, A. et al. (2016) ‘Uniting Resilience Research and Practice With an Inequalities Approach’ SAGE Open, 6(4): 1-13.

Ungar, M. (2008) ‘Resilience across Cultures’, The British Journal of Social Work, 38(2):218–235.