Toward a Culturally and Contextually Sensitive Understanding of Resilience

Abstract

Extant theories of resilience, or the process of adjusting well to adversity, privilege the voices of minority-world young people. Consequently, the resilience of marginalized, majority-world youth is imperfectly understood, and majority-world social ecologies struggle to facilitate resilience in ways that respect the insights of majority-world youth and their cultural and contextual positioning. Accordingly, this article makes audible, as it were, the voices of 181 rural, Black, South African adolescents with the purpose of explicating which resilience-supporting processes characterize their positive adjustment to disadvantaged life-worlds, and how contextual and cultural realities shape such processes. Deductive and inductive analyses of a narrative and visual data set, generated in the qualitative phase of an explanatory mixed-methods study, revealed that universally occurring resilience-supporting mechanisms inform positive adjustment. Importantly, which mechanisms these youth prioritized, and the form these mechanisms take, are shaped by contextual realities of absent men and commonplace suffering, and a cultural reality of strong women, human and spiritual care,

Enabling resilience: Shifting the intergenerational career expectations of South Africans challenged by structural disadvantage

“…Similarly, in the Pathways to Resilience Study, South Africa, young people (aged 12-19) living in structurally disadvantaged communities in the rural Free State repeatedly reported that their continued accommodation of co-occurring adversities (such as poor health, violence, and poverty) was rooted in their hopes of upgraded life prospects (Theron 2015;Theron et al 2014).…”

“…Likewise, a study that linked data generated by 9 717 British 16year-olds to adult outcomes at age 33 showed that parental aspirations, in particular, were a significant predictor of positive outcomes for young people from disadvantaged communities (Schoon, Parsons and Sacker 2004). The importance of career aspirations and associated changes in fortune was also implicitly communicated via the example of older siblings (e.g., Theron and Phasha 2015; Theron and Theron 2013) or teachers who came from similarly disadvantaged circumstances (e.g., Dass-Brailsford 2005;Theron andTheron 2013, 2014b). A 19-year-old undergraduate attributed his aspirations to the example of his brothers when he said, 'We were amongst the poorest in my community.…”

“…Accordingly, in this position paper I assert that career counsellors are social ecological actors who are particularly relevant to the resilience processes of South African young people who are challenged by structural disadvantage. I base this assertion on the understanding that resilience processes and career ambitions intertwine (Theron 2015;Theron, Liebenberg and Malindi 2014). Practicable career aspirations are grounded in informed career choices and knowledge of the multiple demands of a 21 st century labour market (Maree 2010;Savickas 2012a).…”

The resilience-enabling value of African folktales: The read-me-to-resilience intervention

“…For example, Chinese children are socialised to prioritise parental support above all other forms of support (see Tian & Wang, 2015), whereas Sesotho-speaking African children are encouraged to recognise the support implicit in an interdependent way-of-being (Theron, 2016b). This interdependent way-of-being promotes a flexible understanding of kinship that encourages strong social bonds with blood relatives as well as neighbours, peers, and other community members.…”

Championing the resilience of sub-Saharan adolescents: pointers for psychologists

“…Even though resilience is a popular research focus in SSA, those who work with sub-Saharan adolescents have expressed concern that the translational potential of resilience research (i.e., its potential to transform how practitioners enable/sustain resilience) is under-utilised (e.g., Evans, 2005;Skovdal, 2012;Theron, 2012Theron, , 2016Theron, , 2017Van Breda, 2018). This might relate to resilience being a complex phenomenon that is sensitive to developmental, contextual, and sociocultural influences (Panter-Brick, 2015;Ungar, 2011).…”