Linda C. Theron

Toward an African Definition of Resilience: A Rural South African Community’s View of Resilient Basotho Youth

Resilience, or adaptive behavior in the face of adversity, has recently come to be understood as a phenomenon that should not be uniformly conceptualized across contexts and cultures. This emerging understanding has urged exploration of what resilience might mean in specific cultural contexts. As in other majority nation contexts, there is scant documentation of what resilience might mean in an African context. In this article, the authors report on an exploratory qualitative study, rooted in a constructivist grounded theory approach, in which 11 South African adults from an impoverished rural area were invited to provide a description of resilient Basotho youth. In contrast to Eurocentric perspectives, their descriptions, verbal, written, and hand-drawn, offer an Africentric understanding of resilience. This emerging African conceptualization of resilience advocates for deeper exploration of collectivist philosophies underpinning Black youth resilience and continued research into the process of African resilience.

Resilient street youth: a qualitative South African study

Only quite recently have researchers begun to conceptualize street youth as resilient. The findings from our qualitative phenomenological study with 20 adolescent street youth in South Africa augment this transformed conceptualization. Using individual and focus-group interview data, we offer a novel argument that street youth resilience is embedded in a socio-cultural context characterized by stories of adults who have beaten the odds, lived experiences of adults mediating access to protective resources along with youth acceptance of such aid, and cultural pride. This process is co-authored by stoical, reflexive street youth who actively navigate toward and negotiate for resilience-promoting resources. These findings militate for policy and interventions that are asset-based and context-sensitive and that script street youth as active participants in intervention processes. The participants in this study all had access to community resources – this implies that the findings must be interpreted with some caution and urges further research exploring the process of resilience among street youth who are not service-users.

The Hidden Resilience of Street Youth

The phenomenon of resilience among street children as a group of at-risk youth goes unnoticed, since they are not typically regarded as resilient. Street children are mostly categorised as vulnerable youth who need care and support, and this deficit view ignores the assets and resources that enable them towards resilience. Nevertheless, street children are remarkably resilient. Using a qualitative approach (semi-structured and focus group interviews), we explore the hidden resilience of 20 street youths in the Free State and Gauteng. The findings transform the popular conceptualisation of street youth as vulnerable and, instead, paint a picture of young people who negotiate resilient trajectories, strengthened in part by personal resources (that are typically unconventional), bonds to their peer groups, and religiosity, to cope resiliency with the multiple challenges of streetism.

Educational psychology and resilience in developing contexts: A rejoinder to Toland and Carrigan (2011)

If educational psychologists wish to make a meaningful difference as practitioners, both to the children they work with and the ecologies these children come from, then, knowledge and application of resilience theory is crucial. Toland and Carrigan (2011) underscore this relationship in their 2011 article in this Journal. In our contribution below, we extend their assertion by urging greater attention to the interactive processes which underpin resilience and, more particularly, to how proximal, face-to-face transactions embedded in mesosystems and microsystems and nuanced by the distal, macrosystemic influences, mould resilience. Using examples from resilience research conducted in South Africa we argue that such a focus (i.e. on the transactional ecosystemic nature of resilience) is crucial in developing contexts. Furthermore, we contend that sensitivity to mechanisms of resilience as well as the contexts and cultures in which these continuously evolve, begs an approach to practice that foregrounds the ecosystemic, promotes child-ecology transactions, and is cautious about generalizing resilience theory to children across diverse contexts, cultures and time periods. To conceptualize resilience as anything but a reciprocal, dynamic, contextually-influenced interaction between children and their ecologies, would be to fail children in developing contexts.

Resilience Research with South African Youth: Caveats and Ethical Complexities

Studies of resilience, or the process of adjusting well to major challenges commonly associated with negative outcomes, have proliferated in recent years. Despite the popularity of this research focus, there are suggestions (anecdotal and published) that the study of resilience needs to be interrogated. In this article, I respond to these suggestions by offering a synthesis of the international critiques (published from 2000 to 2012) levelled at youth resilience studies. International critiques are rooted in a post-structuralist, transactional-ecological understanding of resilience processes, which differs from earlier person-focused conceptualisations, and which explains positive adaptation as a dynamic collaboration between youth and their social ecologies. Essentially, these critiques highlight five pitfalls that have the potential to undermine ethical and meaningful resilience research. To avoid these pitfalls resilience researchers need to: consider the role of social ecologies when youth do not resile; pay attention to the hidden costs of resilience; measure resilience accurately and comprehensively; engage in evidence-based research practice; and account for how culture and context nuance resilience processes. Using this synthesis, I then appraise studies of South African youth resilience (1990–2011) to illustrate how local studies have only partially acknowledged the caveats and ethical complexities inherent in investigations into processes of positive adjustment. I argue that unidimensional and non-systemic studies of resilience do, indeed, need questioning, but that mindful, participatory studies of resilience, grounded in post-structuralist conceptualisations of hardiness, should be welcomed. In conclusion, I suggest possible future directions for resilience research among South African youth that draw on a synthesis of best practices that have been demonstrated empirically.

When schooling experiences are respectful of children’s rights: A pathway to resilience

This article reports findings from the Pathways to Resilience study, South Africa. Rooted in a social ecological understanding of resilience, this mixed-methods study investigated resilience processes of black South African youths from poverty-stricken, rural contexts. School-attending youths (n  =  951) completed the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure (PRYM), which included one resilience measure and two school experience measures. Independent sample t-tests showed that youth reporting agency-supportive school environments (n  =  137) had significantly higher resilience scores than youth with opposite experiences (n  =  330; t(465)  =  −15.379, p  =  0.000). Likewise, youths reporting school staff respect (n  =  171) recorded significantly higher resilience scores than youth who experienced disrespect (n  =  277; t(446)  =  −14.518, p  =  0.000). Subsequently, 130 resilient youths participated in focus groups and/or visual participatory activities to further explore their pathways to resilience. An inductive content analysis of these data illustrated that teacher-facilitated youth agency, aspirations for higher education and employment, and coping with neglect and cruelty, supported resilience processes. Overall, findings suggest that when schooling experiences are supportive of child rights, resilience processes are promoted. This conclusion urges school psychologists and school communities toward transactional practices that support positive youth development in child rights-centred ways.

Caring Teachers: Teacher–Youth Transactions to Promote Resilience

When communities are challenged by AIDS-related losses, divorce, and violence, teachers become particularly important as “agents of resilience.” The authors use stories collected from nonwhite South African youth who face significant challenges to show how caring teachers who are accessible to children provide an ecological source of hope, optimism, and mentorship.

Toward a Culturally and Contextually Sensitive Understanding of Resilience Privileging the Voices of Black, South African Young People

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, and valorization of education. Attention to these adolescents’ voices not only prompts specific, culturally and contextually relevant leverage points for resilience but also reinforces the importance of attending to young people’s preferred pathways of resilience in order to understand and champion resilience in socially just ways.

Black students’ recollections of pathways to resilience: Lessons for school psychologists

Drawing on narrative data from a multiple case study, I recount the life stories of two resilient Black South African university students to theorize about the processes that encouraged these students, familiar with penury and parental illiteracy, to resile. I aimed to uncover lessons for school psychologists about resilience, and their role in its promotion, from these students’ recollections. To this end, I first synthesize what the resilience literature reports as generic processes of resilience. Thereafter, I illustrate how these processes were common to the students’ stories of resilience, drawing attention to how Africentricism shaped these processes. The understanding of resilience that flows from this case study illustrates the more recent contentions that resilience theory needs to account for the influence of culture on positive adjustment and translate this into culturally sensitive interventions towards resilience. The broad implications for school psychologists include recognition that resilience processes are nuanced by the socio-cultural ecology in which youths are situated and awareness that resilience processes require multiple ecosystemic partners. For school psychologists working with students of African descent, the importance of understanding how resilience processes are informed by an Africentric world view is foregrounded, along with attentiveness to the caveats implicit in this lesson.

Positive adjustment to poverty: how family communities encourage resilience in traditional African contexts

In the main, resilience literature explains positive adjustment to adversity in ways that are biased towards western culture. Although studies of resilience among African Americans have reported the importance of kinship, a typically Africentric concept, no studies have explored how family communities promote youths’ positive adjustment, particularly in contexts of poverty. Family communities are a feature of traditional African culture and comprise extended family members, both alive and deceased. We draw on 14 case studies to illustrate how positive adjustment to poverty was facilitated by appreciative attachment to this community. Each case comprised a resilient black South African student who had adjusted well to the complex challenges associated with poverty. An inductive comparison of their resilience processes, as recounted by each participant in narrative and visual form, demonstrated how their positive adjustment was supported by resilience-supporting transactions within their family community. Specifically, expectation-dominated and example-focused transactions, arising from the family community’s accentuation of mutuality, supported resilience. As such, we conclude that black youth resilience follows communal pathways as emphasised by Africentric culture, in general, and kinship systems, in particular, but urge continued critical investigation of the influence of family communities on youths’ resilience.