Nora Didkowsky

A “Day in the Lives” of Four Resilient Youths Cultural Roots of Resilience

Grounded in the examples of four impoverished, relocated youths (two Sesotho-speaking orphans in South Africa and two Mexican immigrants in Canada), we explore cultural factors as potential roots of resilience. We triangulate rich qualitative findings (visual, dialogical, and observational) to foreground the particular, as well as acknowledge the universal, in explicating resilience in transitional contexts. Resilience-promoting cultural practices rely on adults to function as custodians of protective practices and values and on youth actively to accept their roles as cultural cocustodians. Our findings urge service providers toward forefronting the specific cultural context of young people in their therapeutic interventions and toward purposefully championing resilience-promoting cultural values and practices.

Analysing image-based data using grounded theory: the Negotiating Resilience Project

The use of image-based methods in social science research is gaining increasing prominence, with much being written about the implementation of these methods in the field. To date however, little has been published regarding the integration of analysis frameworks and images. Increasingly, images are being used in research with marginalised and historically silenced communities as a means of accessing experiences and processes previously unarticulated, exploring the taken-for-granted, and facilitating participant voice in research. Where data sets centre around both narrative and visual data, and where the subjective construction of experience becomes the focus of analysis, grounded theory analytic techniques that emphasise reciprocity with participants can help to generate explanations for patterns of behaviour. In this article we present an exemplar of image-based data analysis using grounded theory. We discuss the process adopted by the Negotiating Resilience Project (NRP) in five countries, of using a social constructionist approach to grounded theory in the analysis of both visual (i.e. video and photographic) and the resulting narrative data.