Changing the odds: Learning from mismatched service-provider and youth understandings of what enables resilience

Vulnerable young people’s achievement of functional outcomes depends largely on meaningful social ecological supports. In particular, recent resilience research in both the global North and South shows that young people are... [ view full abstract ]

Vulnerable young people’s achievement of functional outcomes depends largely on meaningful social ecological supports. In particular, recent resilience research in both the global North and South shows that young people are more likely to be resilient when they consider the supports to be personally relevant. This implies the need for service providers to be aware of what resilience-enabling resources young people consider to be pertinent, and to respect youth insights in the course of service planning and delivery. Accordingly, in this paper I report a qualitative study which explored how well service providers’ understandings of resilience-enabling resources matched those of young people. In this study, 290 adult South African youth-focused service-providers and 385 South African adolescents (made vulnerable by structural violence) were separately asked to consider what supports resilience among vulnerable young people. To answer, they generated visual and narrative data (i.e., hand-drawn illustrations of the supports and subsequent written explanations of these). Using thematic analysis and frequency counts of the emerged themes, I compare adult and youth understandings of resilience-enabling resources. In contrasting their understandings, it is apparent that there is some overlap in adult and youth understanding of resilience-enabling supports (both include education, familial, and spiritual resources), but that within these commonalities youth and adults prioritize resources very differently. Youth emphasis was on educational pathways; adult emphasis on kinship systems. Youth valued opportunities to dream of and plan toward a better future; adults discounted these. Adults contributed resilience to personal qualities within young people themselves; youth participants generally did not. This disconnect has implications for social ecological support of youth resilience, including the criticality of service providers respecting youth insights and prioritizations in their determination of advocacy agendas and intervention programs.