Questionnaire data from a cross-sectional study of a randomly selected sample of 5,149 middle-school students from four EU countries (Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain) were used to explore the effects of family violence burden level, structural and procedural risk and protective factors, and personal characteristics on adolescents who are resilient to depression and aggression despite being exposed to domestic violence. Using logistic regression to identify resilience characteristics, our results indicate that structural risks like one's sex, migration experience, and socioeconomic status were not predictive of either family violence burden levels or resilience. Rather, nonresilience to family violence is derived from a combination of negative experiences with high levels of family violence in conjunction with inconsistent parenting, verbally aggressive teachers, alcohol and drug misuse and experiences of indirect aggression with peers. Overall, negative factors outweigh positive factors and play a greater role in determining the resilience level that a young person achieves.
Abstract:In this cross-sectional study on family violence and resilience in a sample of 5,149 middle-school students with a mean age of 14.5 years from four European Union countries (Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain), we worked from the premise that resilience should not be conceptualized as a dichotomous variable. We therefore examined the gender-specific personal and social characteristics of resilience at the three levels "resilient", "near-resilient", and "non-resilient". We also expanded our definition of resilience to include the absence of both externalized and internalized problem behaviours in adolescents who have been exposed to violence in their families. Using multinomial logistic regression we found reliable gender differences in the protective and risk factors between the three resilience levels. We also found that the achieved reliability of our resilience classifications is very high. Our findings suggest that adolescents' positive adjustment despite family violence is affected only in small part by school characteristics. The co-morbidity of social risks in the family and individual factors explains a much larger part of the variance in the analysis. From a content perspective this means that an individual's "resilience status" can be influenced in a focused way by moderating the living environment. These results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for policy.
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