A Dynamic and Gender Sensitive Understanding of Adolescents’ Personal and School Resilience Characteristics Despite Family Violence: The Predictive Power of the Family Violence Burden Level

Abstract

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.

Thriving despite Parental Physical Abuse in Adolescence: A Two-Wave Latent Transition Analysis on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Violence-Resilience Outcome Indicators

“…Identifying violence-resilience outcomes and recognizing adolescents' resilience after they experience parental physical abuse is a complex endeavor. Even though adolescents experiencing parental abuse commonly show psychopathological symptoms, international research confirms that about one-third of adolescents physically abused by parents do not show psychopathological symptoms, such as depression and aggression toward peers [7,41].…”

Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in Adolescents With and Without Experiences of Physical Parental Violence, a Latent Profile Analysis on Violence Resilience

“…Different criteria, in turn, lead to different outcomes, more complicating the comparison of these outcomes, and do not provide space for youths who cannot or should not be clearly labeled as resilient or non-resilient. As one of the less common examples, Kassis et al (2013b , 2015) operationalized violence resilience non-dichotomously and showed that youths can find their place between the extremes of resilient and non-resilient and that the absolute achievement of resilience is not necessarily the only positive form of development, but a continuum-based resilience can be a useful alternative to the dichotomous operationalization. In a cross-sectional study of family violence and resilience in a random sample of 5,149 middle school students in Europe, the researchers found that 31% of youths were resilient, 28.3% near-resilient (mid-level scores for violence perpetration and/or depression symptoms), and 40.6% non-resilient ( Kassis et al, 2013b ).…”

Uniting Resilience Research and Practice With an Inequalities Approach

“…Presently, the fourth wave is said to be in ascendance, as the discoveries of the first three waves become assimilated with more sophisticated methods of investigation to develop a richer understanding of the multilevel, contextualized, and dynamic nature of resilience (e.g., Kassis, Artz, Moldenhauer, Geczey, & Rossiter, 2015). Using Bronfenbrenner's (1977) human ecology theory, an ecological understanding of resilience places both the individual and the adversity within a dynamic multilevel context, where the impact of higher level factors (e.g., social, economic, cultural) on factors proximal to children is emphasized (Cassen, Feinstein, & Graham, 2009).…”