Toward a culturally sensitive conceptualization of resilience: Participatory research with war-affected communities in northern Uganda

Abstract

Resilience research with war-affected populations has long conceptualized resilience as the absence of psychopathology and operationalized it by use of standardized measures. However, literature on resilience increasingly highlights the importance of also including indicators of positively valued functioning as well as contextually sensitive indicators of resilience. This study used a participatory approach to examine the contextual conceptualization of youth resilience in the aftermath of war in northern Uganda, as defined by groups of stakeholders (youths, parents, elders, leaders, teachers) in four communities. The results identify 40 indicators covering a multiplicity of domains of functioning. The rationales behind these indicators were clustered into the broad themes: progress, selfreliance, social connectedness, morality, health, and comfort. The findings suggest that positively and negatively valued aspects of functioning are both key to conceptualizing resilience, and indicate the importance of including contextually distinguished indicators. The findings further point to the role of individual and collective processes in the construction of resilience, and to the need to take into account the contexts wherein resilience is conceptualized and observed. This study generated contextually sensitive indicators of young people's resilience, which can be used, complementary to existing

Lives on hold: A qualitative study of young refugees’ resilience strategies

“…These backgrounds can influence the resources that are accessible to them to overcome adversity. In this regard and because of the lack of agreement about the way resilience is constructed within young refugees, qualitative measures are particularly helpful: they seek answers to questions about the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of an equivocal phenomenon such as resilience ( Green and Thorogood, 2013 ), and they can detect unnamed and specific cultural and contextual factors associated with resilient functioning ( Ungar and Nichol, 2002 ; Vindevogel et al, 2015 ).…”

Resilient and Self‐reliant Life: South Sudanese Refugees Imagining Futures in the Adjumani Refugee Setting, Uganda

“…The narratives in this article have likewise illustrate that the availability of food aid gives refugees the opportunity to start their own businesses and demonstrate agency, while the reduction of food aid leads them to feel ‘like a kid’. Several authors who have worked on resilience emphasise the need for the availability of social and economic resources on which refugees can build (Barber, ; Masten and Narayan, ; Sleijpen and others, ), and they point to the interplay between individual and collective domains of functioning when designing resilience interventions (Ager, ; Rutter, ; Vindevogel and others, ). By the same token, the ability to be self‐reliant depends fundamentally on the refugees’ access to rights and protection (Easton‐Calabria and Omata, ; Kaiser, ; Meyer, ).While there is relative consensus in academic literature about a holistic and systemic approach towards resilience and self‐reliance, such an approach seems difficult to achieve in practice in the context of the camp.…”

Post-disaster Psychosocial Capacity Building for Women in a Chinese Rural Village

“…This study suggests that the community networks in Zhangjiaping Village offered positive effects to women during disaster recovery because they were therapeutic in nature. They empowered the affected across a multiplicity of life domains, including livelihood, physical health, mental health, social and cultural life, and spirituality (Ganapati 2012;Vindevogel et al 2015).…”