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, 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.

Keywords

Black resilience processes youth rural social justice South Africa visual methods

Resilience, or the process of adjusting well to significant adversity, is supported by a complex interplay of personal (including genetic), relational, and contextual protective mechanisms (Bowes & Jaffee, 2013; Cicchetti, 2010; Masten, 2001, 2014; Panter-Brick & Leckman, 2013; Rutter, 1987, 2013; Ungar, 2011). Accordingly, resilience is more than a psychological quality—it is an interactive process in which young people and their environments co-invest. From a social ecological perspective (Ungar, 2011, 2012)—the theoretical framework of this article—this process requires that youth actively seek out, and appropriate the resources needed to facilitate their positive adjustment, and that their ecologies provide such resources in relevant ways. In fact, Ungar (2013) contended that social ecologies are crucially responsible for the positive outcomes of young people whose life circumstances predict negative outcomes. Although young people’s personal resources (e.g., social aptitude) and personal agency are not discounted, the emphasis in social ecological explanations of resilience is on relational (e.g., caregiver support) and contextual mechanisms (e.g., social justice processes or meaningful service provision). Implicit in this assertion is the need for social ecologies to initiate resilience processes, rather than wait for young people to seek out support (Theron & Engelbrecht, 2012).

Youth-directed understanding of resilience-supporting social ecological mechanisms, and how these mechanisms vary depending on sociocultural context, is incomplete (Masten, 2014; McCubbin & Moniz, 2015; Panter-Brick, 2015; Ungar, 2011, 2013, 2015b; Wright, Masten, & Narayan, 2013). In particular, the views of majority-world young people are under-represented in explanations of resilience (Liebenberg & Ungar, 2009; Ungar, 2013). Instead, resilience is more typically explained as a set of generic mechanisms or protective factors, with little attention paid to how a particular life-world (i.e., the contextual and cultural reality of an adolescent) influences the form that such generic mechanisms take (Ungar, 2015a). Implicit in the aforementioned is the need for resilience studies that include qualitative, youth-generated accounts of what supports youth living in majority-world contexts to beat the odds. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is twofold: First, it is to report Black South African (SA) young people’s phenomenological accounts of the resilience mechanisms that support their positive adjustment amidst rural, disadvantaged life-worlds that place them at risk of negative life outcomes, and second, it is to investigate how cultural and contextual realities shape the expression of these resilience mechanisms.

Published studies of the resilience of Black SA youth in the face of socioeconomic disadvantage have been critiqued for not completely addressing the two issues raised above (Theron, 2012; Theron & Theron, 2010). Among these studies, a handful (i.e., Dass-Brailsford, 2005; Phasha, 2010; Pienaar, Swanepoel, van Rensburg, & Heunis, 2011; Theron, 2007; Theron & Malindi, 2010) report on cultural resources that inform the resilience processes of young people, including spirituality, respect for elders, actively supportive kinship systems, and cultural pride. These studies do not, however, theorize how this cultural legacy modifies universally reported (or generic) resilience processes, nor how these processes reflect the contextual positioning of young people. The two studies (i.e., Theron & Theron, 2013; Theron, Theron, & Malindi, 2013) that do provide culturally sensitive explanations of the resilience processes of young Black people foreground the voices of SA adults and young adults.

Thus, two specific research questions frame this article:

Research Question 1: Which processes of resilience, as reported by Black SA youth themselves, characterize positive adjustment amidst economically disadvantaged, rural life-worlds?

Research Question 2: How do cultural and contextual realities shape how these processes play out?

A Brief Review of the Relevant Literature

Generic Resilience Mechanisms

Large-scale reviews of investigations into the resilience of majority-world youth have revealed youth↔ecology resilience-supporting mechanisms that are common across diverse contexts of adversity (see, for example, Cicchetti, 2010; Masten & Wright, 2010; Werner, 2013). Masten and Wright (2010) labeled these universally recurring mechanisms the “short list” (p. 222). The “short-list” includes healthy processes of attachment, self-regulation, meaning-making, intelligence, cultural and religious affiliation, and agency and mastery. Although some of these mechanisms (e.g., intelligence and agency) might appear to prioritize resources within young people themselves, each demands social ecological collaboration. For example, in order to intelligently solve problems, social ecologies need to facilitate the access of young people to information, support their development of problem solving skills, and provide them with opportunities for quality education.

Similarly, an 11-country (Canada, the United States, China, India, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Gambia, Tanzania, South Africa, Colombia) study of the positive adjustment of at-risk young people indicated seven, interacting youth↔ecology mechanisms common to the resilience of majority- and minority-world youth (Ungar et al., 2007). These were comprised of constructive relationships, a powerful identity, access to material resources, a sense of social and/or spiritual cohesion, experiences of control and efficacy, adherence to cultural norms and beliefs, and social justice. As with the “short list,” these mechanisms require social ecological input. For example, youth adherence to cultural norms and beliefs implies social-ecologically facilitated familiarity with these. Likewise, experiences of social justice imply membership of a community that is respectful of human rights and actively redresses any violation of these.

The Inadequacy of Generic Mechanisms to Completely Explain Resilience

Scholars of resilience increasingly report that such apparently universal mechanisms of resilience are culturally/contextually relative (Masten, 2014; Panter-Brick, 2015; Ungar, 2011, 2013, 2015b; Ungar et al., 2007; Wright et al., 2013). For example, Buckner, Mezzacappa, and Beardslee (2003) reported that resilient U.S. youth from low income families had more sophisticated self-regulatory capacities than less resilient youth. The resilient youth were also more closely monitored by their mothers, and there was some speculation that this relational resource prompted and/or strengthened self-regulatory capacities. However, these results were not replicated in the culturally and contextually dissimilar context of Hong Kong. Ngai, Cheung, To, Liu, and Song (2013) found that parental monitoring had no significant influence on the resilience processes of poor youth. Similarly, within the context of dysfunctional Hawaiian families, Werner and Smith (1982) associated children’s resilience with an absence of child-parent attachments. Unexpectedly, children’s avoidance of this commonly reported adaptive system supported their resilience. These examples call into question the universal protective value of commonly reported resilience-supporting mechanisms, and flag the need for researcher attention to how sociocultural and contextual influences shape the mechanisms that facilitate positive adjustments.

Even though extant research points to heterogeneous processes of resilience, explanations of resilience privilege studies conducted in minority-world contexts (Masten, 2014; Werner, 2013). This means that theorists continue to pay scant attention to which resilience processes underpin positive outcomes for specific groups of youth in majority-world contexts, and how these processes are relative to the cultural and contextual positioning of young people (Panter-Brick, 2015; Ungar, 2013). In doing so, facilitation of resilience processes by majority-world social ecologies is potentially limited given that effective facilitation hinges on robust comprehension of majority-world adolescents’ accounts of their positive adjustment, rather than on those of minority-world youth (Masten, 2014).

Method

To address the currently deficient understandings of the resilience processes of majority-world young people, I draw on qualitative data generated in the Pathways to Resilience Study, South Africa. The Pathways Study employed an explanatory mixed-methods design to identify and explore the resilience processes (including formal services and informal supports) characterizing positive adjustment among adolescents placed at risk of maladaptive development.¹ The first phase generated quantitative profiles of the risk, resilience, and service-use patterns of young people. The second follow-up phase facilitated deeper understandings of the processes underpinning young people’s resilience. A phenomenological approach informed this qualitative stage, in that the focus, following Creswell (2012), was on young people’s personal, resilience-related experiences.

Contextualization of the Pathways to Resilience Study, South Africa

Poverty is associated with personal and social risks that predict negative educational outcomes, poor psychosocial well-being, physiological ill-health, and low social cohesiveness (Owens & Shaw, 2003). Such harmful sequelae relate to poverty being more than a matter of restricted finances (Chireshe, 2010). Poor people typically reside in structurally disadvantaged and/or dangerous neighborhoods with under-resourced schools, inaccessible or inadequate health care and recreation facilities, few (if any) local role models, and a youth culture that promotes anti-social values (Akande, 2000; Felner & DeVries, 2013; Ngai et al., 2013). Furthermore, youth from poor families are more likely to know disrupted attachments, disadvantageous parenting practices, and social marginalization (Chireshe, 2010).

The SA Pathways Study took place in the Thabo Mofutsanyana District, an impoverished rural region in Free State, one of nine provinces in the country. Young people in Free State are challenged by multiple risks, with Black youth being at disproportionately higher risk. For example, 60% of youth, the majority Black, live below a poverty line of approximately US$50 per month. One in three of these young people lives in a family in which no adult is employed (Hall, 2012). Around 7% are double orphans; again, more of these are Black youth of school-going age. More than a third (39.1%) live with their mother only, and around 13% of their fathers are deceased (Meintjies & Hall, 2012). Even when fathers are alive, Black youth from Free State (and other rural provinces) are typically reared by their mothers and/or grandmothers (Hall & Posel, 2012). This is ascribed partly to apartheid’s ills, which forced many Black men to become migrant laborers (Richter, Chikovore, & Makusha, 2010), and partly to the high incidence of teenage pregnancy. In SA, a third of women become mothers before the age of 20 (Shefer, Bhana, & Morrell, 2013), with a disproportionate number being Black girls from poor families. When the fathers (also typically teenagers) fail to comply with the cultural practice of reparation, that is, financial “damage payments” (Swartz & Bhana, 2009, p. 65) to the young girl’s family, they are disallowed involvement in their children’s lives. Grandmothers frequently raise the offspring of their teenage children. They also parent their grandchildren when rural mothers migrate to urban areas in search of employment (Ramphele, 2002), or when their grandchildren are orphaned (Casale, 2011).

The Thabo Mofutsanyana District endures the above challenges: It is characterized by significant poverty, unemployment, violence, inferior infrastructure, high incidence of HIV and AIDS, and orphanhood (Theron et al., 2013). This district was, therefore, purposefully chosen as the research site, given that young people living there were more likely to face multiple risks. During the fieldwork, which included occasional visits to participants’ homes, researchers saw sparsely furnished, one- or two-room homes without electricity.

In the Thabo Mofutsanyana District, as in other parts of South Africa, traditional Black families socialize youth to respect Ubuntu values (Theron et al., 2013). Ubuntu values teach respectful and generous interdependence, along with reverence for God and ancestral beings (Bujo, 2009; Mandela, 1995). Allied to respectful interdependence is the expectation that youth will honor their obligations to their families and communities. This duty includes bringing esteem to the family/community (e.g., by completing schooling/obtaining a university degree) and contributing to the family’s financial survival (Phasha, 2010; Theron & Theron, 2013). Political icons such as Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko valorized education as a means for Black SAs to transform their personal and collective trajectories (Biko, 1979; Mandela, 1995), and this valorization continues into the present (Gqola, 2011).

Participants

A total of 1,137 youth generated usable data in the quantitative phase of the Pathways Study, South Africa. This included 186 youth with a history of formal service use (i.e., use of state-facilitated services such as mental health, juvenile justice, or special education), 730 school-going youth, and 221 youth who were considered resilient by the local community. The project’s Community Advisory Panel (CAP) facilitated participant recruitment. The CAP was comprised of local adults who provide services to youth (e.g., social workers, teachers, and religious leaders) and who have extensive community networks (see Theron et al., 2013, for details). The CAP enabled researcher contact with gatekeepers in schools, service agencies (e.g., children’s homes and youth-focused non-governmental organizations [NGOs]), and local communities who could nominate eligible youth (i.e., youth aged 13-19 who were facing poverty-related personal and social risks).

The mean age of these 1,137 participants was 16 years (standard deviation [SD] = 1.64 years). Most (n = 1,110, 97.6%) self-identified as Black (predominantly Sesotho-speaking). Girls were the majority (n = 599, 52.7%). Most attended school (n = 1,129, 99.3%). The highest average grade completed was Grade 8 (SD = 1.4). Most youth lived with a single mother (n = 376, 33.1%), and 6.33% lived with their grandmothers.

Following detailed information about the project and ethical issues (e.g., voluntary participation, the right to withdraw, and researcher duty to disclose harm), all nominated participants and their caregivers consented in writing. Participants then completed the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure (PRYM), a compendium of 11 self-report measures that assess risks, resources, strengths, difficulties, social determinants of health, service experiences, and resilience processes (Resilience Research Centre, 2010). In the course of PRYM completion, youth self-reported multiple risks that had challenged their well-being in the preceding year. The most prominent included school pressures (n = 440, 39%), death/loss (n = 521, 46%), and unsafe communities (n = 643, 56.6%).

The qualitative sample was drawn from the above population (see Figure 1). In total, 181 young people, characterized as resilient, generated qualitative data. Their resilience was deduced in two ways. First, they were considered resilient because their community concluded this (using community-generated indicators of resilience, namely, educational progress, future orientation, access to supportive networks, tolerance of hardship, and displaying constructive values and resilience-supporting personal qualities; see Theron et al., 2013, for details of these). Of the 221 resilient youth originally nominated to the study in this way, 143 agreed to participate in the follow-up qualitative explorations of their resilience. Second, participants whose PRYM scores showed the highest risk and highest resilience totals (compared with the mean risk and resilience scores of the total sample) were considered resilient. However, when researchers sought the first 50 such participants, approximately 9 months after completion of the PRYM, only 38 could be traced. This probably relates to the high mobility of rural SA youth (Fataar, 2010). Because these 181 participants generated saturated data, following Creswell (2012), additional participants were not sought.

Figure 1.

Summary of samples informing qualitative data set.

The demographics of the 181 resilient participants in the qualitative study were similar to those of the study population: They all self-identified as Black and had a mean age of 16 years (SD = 1.64 years). The majority were girls (55%). All participants attended school. A third lived with their mothers only.

Qualitative Methods

Participants were randomly included in one of the three qualitative methods detailed below.

Semi-structured interviews

There were 10 participants (5 boys and 5 girls) who took part in one-on-one, semi-structured interviews. These interviews took place in school-/community-based venues at times that suited the participants, and lasted approximately 30 minutes each. They were audio-recorded and transcribed. Pathways’ researchers used the Resilience Research Centre’s Interview Guide’s nine questions to learn about the poverty-related risks these youth experienced, how they coped well with these, and how their social ecologies supported this coping.² In general, these interviews generated thin, polite answers, despite the researchers being experienced interviewers. A possible reason for this could be the traditional socialization of rural Black youth to respect adults and provide pleasing answers (Theron & Malindi, 2012). This difficulty prompted the use of the visual methods detailed below. Increasingly, resilience researchers are advised to consider visual methodologies in interactions with majority-world young people, given the potential of these methods to afford comfortable, discursive spaces in which they can share their insights (Liebenberg, 2009; Liebenberg & Theron, 2015).

Draw-and-Write

Draw-and-Write entails requesting participants to make a drawing that shows their understanding of a given research phenomenon and to explain what their drawing conveys about the said phenomenon (Guillemin, 2004). It is reported to be a non-threatening, powerful means of extracting young people’s understandings, particularly when research foci include abstract phenomena or subjects about which discussion is taboo (Mitchell, 2011). Participant explanations about the meaning of their drawings limit concerns relating to subjective, researcher-led interpretations of drawings (Guillemin & Drew, 2010).

In this study, participants’ drawings were guided by the following prompt: “What has helped you to do well in your life so far, even though you face difficulties? Please draw what has helped you to do well in your life so far.” A total of 133 resilient young people (82 girls and 51 boys) drew pictures (see Figure 1). They did so in researcher-facilitated groups during non-academic time at local schools. The groups ranged in size from 25 to 35 youth. It was difficult for participants to see what others were drawing.

On completion, researchers requested participants to explain, in writing, using their language of preference, how whatever they had drawn was supportive of their resilience (i.e., how the drawn resource had encouraged them to adjust positively to hardship). Only four chose to write in Sesotho (their mother tongue). These explanations were translated by Sesotho-speaking members of the research team and verified by a language practitioner. Six participants’ explanations offered no insight into how the drawn resources encouraged adjustment (e.g., I drew a house). These drawings and explanations were not included in the analysis.

Mmogo-method^TM

The Mmogo-method^TM entails inviting participants to create a representation of a given research phenomenon using traditional African materials such as clay, beads, and dried grass stalks (Roos, 2008). Participants do so in small groups. Once the representations are built, each explains his or her representation, and researchers/other participants then probe and/or comment on what this explanation reveals about the said phenomenon. Essentially, this prompts an easy-going focus group process (Roos, 2012).

In this study, 38 resilient youth (24 boys and 14 girls) created clay representations (see Figure 1). They did this in seven small groups, ranging in size from four to seven members, at times and in school-/community-based venues that suited them. To guide this activity, researchers asked, “What has helped you to do well in your life so far, even though you face difficulties? Please use the provided materials to build a representation of what has helped you to do well in your life so far.” Researchers and group members probed/commented on young people’s follow-up explanations. Participants had the choice to explain in Sesotho. In such instances, their explanations were translated by Sesotho-speaking researchers who were part of the Pathways team. This focus-group-like process was recorded (with participants’ permission) and lasted approximately 90 minutes. Researchers photographed the clay models.

Data Analysis

For the purpose of this article, data analysis occurred in two phases. First, a research psychologist and I perused the visual and narrative data sets until these were familiar to us. This was followed by an a priori content analysis (Saldana, 2009) to determine which processes of resilience distinguish participants’ positive adjustment. To this end, we coded the data independently and deductively for instances of the seven universally occurring, resilience-supporting mechanisms reported by Ungar et al. (2007). These mechanisms were preferred above those of Masten and Wright’s (2010) “short list” (p. 222), mentioned above, because they originate from a study including majority-world youth. Coding was followed by a consensus discussion (see Saldana, 2009), which was fairly brief because the two sets of coding were almost identical. See the first and last columns of Table 1 for the a priori codes that fitted the data.

Table 1.

Recurring Resilience-Supporting Mechanisms and the Contextual and Cultural Issues That Distinguish Them.

Resilience mechanism	Definition (adapted from Ungar, 2015b).	Cultural/contextual distinguishing feature	Examples (drawn from interviews and Mmogo transcripts and written explanations of drawings)
Access to material resources	Support to obtain sufficient food, clothing, education, employment, etc.	Access mediated by extended relationships with women	Even when there is no food in the house, my grandmother makes plans to find food so that we can eat before we sleep. (Boy, 15 years)
			A mother is a special gift . . . when you need something she does everything she can to get it. Even if you need clothes, she sacrifices to buy for you. She will work in winter because she wants me to be warm and to have food. (Boy, 17 years)
			In 2005 my father went away in search of work. He didn’t even come for the burial of my younger brother, he only sent money. He came for the first time in 2009. He sent a little money after months, not enough. . . . My mother would do something, domestic work, doing washing for other people, to get a few rand [dollars]. (Boy, 15 years)
			I was accepted by my aunt . . . She’s taking good care of me at the moment. And, I’m never hungry, I have food every day. (Girl, 14 years)
			I used to help my grandmother and she used to pay me a little bit of money at the end of the month— . . . there wasn’t money for school fees, so I helped my grandmother and it helped pay my school fees. (Boy, 16 years)
		Access mediated by family-like/caring connections with service providers	I take him [pastor] as my parent because he gave me an opportunity to stay here [at a children’s home] and to study further. (Boy, 16 years)
			They [teachers] always helped me when I needed anything for school . . . they were like the parents there at school. (Girl, 19 years)
			When my performance was bad [after his house burnt down], some of my teachers said to me, “Don’t worry, your home is gonna be alright.” Some teachers give me money, some teachers give me some clothes . . . . (Boy, 15 years)
			If you have a problem in your house, you don’t have food or your mother doesn’t work, they [teachers] give you money to give to your mother, buy you clothes. At break you go to them and they give you money to buy some lunch. (Girl, 18 years)
			My social worker is very helpful. Sometimes I will urgently need to go home when my mom is sick and she will tell me, “Don’t worry, I will give you my money.” Her money, not the children’s home, her money to go home for the weekend! (Girl, 19 years)
Constructive relationships	Positive connections with other people	Dominated by relationships with women	My grandmother is like a mother to me. If it wasn’t [for] her, I don’t know where I would have been with my life. She is always there for me. She wipes every tear that I cry. She was the only one who was there when I lost my parents. (Girl, 16 years)
			My mom—she’s there, the thing that gives me that vooma [energy], that oomph and yea, to get going every day. She advises me, she encourages me to go to school every day. And she also tell me about the things of life . . . And she’s like the most pretty thing, beautiful thing that I ever had in life. . . . This heart represents the love that my mother has for me, and for us as her children, and also for all the people who surround us. (Girl, 16 years)
			She [mother] was there through hard times when I needed her most. Like when I was seven, I was raped by my uncle. I wanted to kill myself, but my mom was there to support and to guide me . . . we are not a privileged family, but we support each other. My mom is sick, [but] . . . she’s there for me. Even if she doesn’t have money . . . she’s everything I need. (Girl, 15 years)
			The very beautiful drawing that I have drawn can mean many things, but according to me it means something unique that my mother has done for me since I was a little kid and that is love. She has loved me so much . . . it is that love that makes me so dedicated to navigate through life. I always think about my relationship with her and with that in my mind I conquer any obstacle. (Boy, 19 years)
		Dominated by family-like/caring connections with service providers and friends	She [social worker] is like my mother, she cares about me, so I can go to her with everything. (Girl, 18 years)
			She (social worker) treats me like her daughter. (Girl, 15 years)
			Miss [name] who teaches me English . . . like I see her as my mother . . . I talk to her when I feel sad sometimes. And she’ll ask me, like when I’m absent, she will ask me like where was I and if something is wrong I must come and tell her. (Girl, 18 years)
			She [caregiver at children’s home] is really a great source of support . . . I think she’s the one that played the biggest role in my life—as a parent I would say . . . . (Girl, 19 years)
			My teacher loves me . . . and she would ask me how I feel, every day she would ask me how I feel. (Girl, 14 years)
Sense of cohesion	A sense of belonging and/or that life has meaning	Commonplace suffering encourages equanimity	I have realized that I am not the only one who has been in difficult situations before . . . [so] I told myself to work very hard . . . When I face difficulties I face them. (Boy, 16 years)
			Sometimes I lose hope, say I’m busy studying and I remember that I don’t have parents . . . then I tell myself that I’m not the only one who doesn’t have parents and that encourages me to study again. (Boy, 18 years)
			I told myself I’m not the first one [to have been robbed and to know poverty] . . . I’ll go on with my life. (Boy, 16 years)
			There was a magazine—the article was about a child that wants his father; since he was born he didn’t know his father. So I was facing that kind of an issue too . . . that child was crying and asking his father to come back in his life, but [then] I saw it’s not important to want the person that don’t want you. (Girl, 17 years)
		Spirituality encourages equanimity	I’m happy now because I know that everything bad that happens to me, there’s a reason for it . . . I know it will change someday . . . and it will get better . . . (Girl, 18 years)
			You have to have faith in God that He lets these things happen for a reason, and so I just got over it [being rejected and abused]. (Girl, 19 years)
			I know that it is the purpose of God that I’m here . . . I shall not hate my life. (Girl, 15 years)
			I just tell myself God has a plan with my life, no matter how bad or something but He will always be there. (Girl, 18 years)
A powerful identity	A sense of purpose and personal success	Valorization of education	Learning is important because if you haven’t finished your grade twelve, there’s nothing in life for you . . . Most of our parents did not attend school. They are struggling to send us to school. They are struggling to get food for us. They are struggling to pay for transportation to school. (Boy, 16 years)
			Education is the key to live out my dreams . . . one day my mother will eat my money [benefit from my schooling]. School has opened the door for me and all I have to do is to be responsible. (Girl, 17 years)
			She [grandmother] wanted me to go to school. I got to school. Now I am clever. I’d like to do something for her and the world. (Boy, 13 years)
			This book [points to clay model] helps me a lot because if I didn’t have this book I would have been a street kid or someone else that has no future. (Girl, 15 years)
			School helps me because if I’m not educated I’m not going to find a job, like being a teacher or a doctor. I’m only going to find a piece-job [part-time menial employment]. (Girl, 14 years)
			There are people of my age in the township here, who smoke dagga, who don’t like going to school. They steal furniture and they sell it. I don’t want to live like that because once you go to jail you might not come back again. School helps me to learn so that I can finish my Matric and to prepare myself for a better career. (Boy, 18 years)
Cultural adherence	Identification with group’s beliefs/norms	Allegiance to ancestral and Christian practices promise solutions to problems	When I’m facing difficulties, I stick to my culture and the cultural practices that I have learnt . . . We slaughter goats and we perform traditions [ancestral rituals]. (Boy, 18 years)
			Participant: These are ancestral ceremonies [points to clay model of a fowl] so that the ancestors can come and heal me. Just knowing that I can be healed and be able to continue with my life, go to school . . . makes me strong. Not only when you are ill but also when you are looking for a job, the ancestors can also help.Research team member: Who taught you about the ancestors?Participant: My grandmother tells us stories about ancestors. She taught us that even when you are a Christian you mustn’t forget about the ancestors because they can still help. (Girl, 13 years)
			I was taught to pray and when you have problems you go to Him and you pray . . . My grandmother taught me . . . The ancestors are there, they also help me, but God is the one above. (Boy, 16 years)
			I surround my life with church: Simply, God is everything; without Him I am nothing. He is the one that helped me to overcome the problems I had. (Boy, 17 years)
			She (mother) taught me to go to church, whether it’s raining or hot or whatever circumstances. And she taught me how to pray . . . I know even if I can move to [distant city], I will still remember that I am a Sotho girl . . . [this means] at the end of the day we always do thanksgivings— . . . thanks to God, to the ancestors. (Girl, 16 years)

Next, I reconsidered the data segments attached to the resilience-supporting mechanisms (as identified in the above phase). I interrogated what cultural and/or contextual factors were integral to how the resilience-supporting mechanisms played out. To this end, I used inductive coding to assign labels (e.g., instances of problem solving being linked to belief in ancestral supports was labeled “allegiance to ancestral practices promise solutions”; instances of a powerful identity being linked to being invested in education was labeled “valorisation of education”). The labels paraphrased (see Creswell, 2012) how culture/context distinguished Ungar et al.’s (2007) mechanisms (see the third column of Table 1). I understood culture as everyday practices, and the beliefs and values related to these practices and context as the physical and social environment of young people (as defined by Ungar, 2015b).

Trustworthiness

The data were generated by experienced researchers (three men and two women of whom four were English-speaking and one Sesotho-speaking), two doctoral students (one man, one woman), and three Sesotho-speaking research assistants (one man, two women). The researchers carefully trained the students and assistants to use the methods specified above. This training emphasized the credibility-related importance of participants co-analyzing their drawings and clay models, by explaining them in their own way (see Mitchell, 2011). The multi-racial CAP provided a form of member checking. They actively scrutinized the generated data and the results that emerged (see Theron, 2013). Their comments were used to fine-tune interpretation and heighten trustworthiness (see Altheide & Johnson, 2011). Moreover, the triangulation of diverse sources of data and multiple youth voices supported confidence in the findings (see Table 1). In addition, I presented the interpretation reported in this article to members of the Pathways team and veteran resilience researchers. Their endorsement encouraged my belief in its validity.

Findings

Five of the seven universally occurring resilience mechanisms reported by Ungar et al. (2007) inform the resilience of this study’s participants. These mechanisms play out in distinctive ways. This distinctiveness, as well as the absence of social justice and of control/efficacy mechanisms from the young people’s accounts, reflects their contextual positioning and cultural life-worlds.

Distinctive Expressions of Universal Resilience Processes

As summarized in Table 1, youth associated how they coped well with poverty, and related risks (such as chronically ill parents, being orphaned and/or neglected, and experiencing violence) with (a) access to material resources, (b) relational supports, (c) experiences of cohesion, (d) a powerful identity (albeit prospective), and (e) adherence to cultural values. Although these mechanisms are separated out in Table 1, they are intertwined. For example, access to material resources was associated with constructive relationships and vice versa; adherence to cultural practices (e.g., spirituality) and an associated sense of cohesion entailed relational supports that instructed young people in the value of these practices.

No participants gave voice to experiences of social justice. There was sporadic reference to instances of control and efficacy that allowed young people to effect change that supported their resilience, but these references were not prevalent enough to constitute compelling evidence of this mechanism. Essentially, when there was reference to efficacy, it related to these young people securing part-time employment, or to their collaborating toward collective goals. For example, a 17-year-old girl built a clay model of a garden (see Figure 2) and explained,

We made a garden so that we can find money to support our families, or the money to buy some clothes . . .

Researcher:

When do you work in the garden?

Participant:

After school—we have our timetable when we go to the garden.

Researcher:

And who started the garden?

Participant:

Us as the group [youth support group] . . . the government provided us with food—sometimes they provided us with food that we don’t like, so we thought that we can make a garden—then we can eat the things we want to eat, any time we want it.

Figure 2.

A collective garden.

As Ungar et al. (2007) and Ungar (2015b) caution, the reported mechanisms had distinguishing features (see column three of Table 1). In addition to the narrative explanations of young people (as exemplified in Table 1), visual contents that commonly re-occurred in drawings and models reflected what was distinctive about how their social ecology supported their resilience processes.³ For example, mothers/grandmothers (see Figures 3 and 4) were the focus of 44 drawings (35%) and most clay models (n = 11, 29%). No participants drew fathers by themselves, although there were 13 drawings of parents (10%). No participants built clay models that represented their fathers. Similarly, 53 youth (42%) drew education-related resources (see Figure 5) and 3 built school-related models. Spiritual symbols were the focus of 15 drawings (12%; see Figure 6) and 2 clay models.

Figure 3.

My mother bringing food home.

Figure 4.

My grandmother talking about the importance of school.

Figure 5.

Books and light are important resources for getting an education.

Figure 6.

Loving others, religion, and my mother help me do well in life.

Contextual Influences on Resilience Processes

The distinguishing features of the resilience processes of these young people can be explained, in part, by their rural, disadvantaged context. Moreover, their contextual realities potentially account for their under-reporting of control and efficacy, and non-reporting of social justice.

Absent men

A socioeconomic reality is that fewer young and middle-aged men than women are physically present in SA rural life-worlds (Richter et al., 2010). This reality was evident in young people’s accounts of their resilience. Their occasional mention of male relatives was typically in reference to their financial support, or encouragement to prioritize education, but there was scant sense that male relatives were dependably supportive of their resilience. In particular, these scant references insinuated that other than siring them, their fathers were uninvolved, or working elsewhere, or deceased, and that these absences mattered. Implicit in these references was the sense that mothers/women became their default resource. An 18-year-old boy’s explanation of the ambulance he built during a Mmogo session illustrates this.

An ambulance came to our house in 2009 . . . to fetch my mother and she passed away . . . I used to love my mother a lot, we were close. When my mother was ill, my father did not come regularly to see my mother . . . when we phoned him he would say he didn’t have money to come. We were four in the house: my mother, myself, my brother, and a sister. My father used to work in [distant town] and he was living with another lady. My father used to send money, but not enough. Sometimes he would tell us he owed a bank a certain amount of money and not send enough money. My mother used to approach my grandfather, and my grandfather used to support us. My uncle also used to give us money and food. My father passed away in August last year 2010. So I’m living with my sister, and there’s no-one else. My sister is unemployed but at the end of the month my uncles send some money for us to live.

When fathers or other male relatives were physically present, and involved, this was experienced as protective:

I live with my uncle, my parents are passed away. So, my uncle help us to search for some food . . . My uncle taught me about the sheeps and the animals, and when they need water I must give them water, and even when I have a shortage of something, I should work hard to get some solution for that problem . . . when I come back from school, he’s always there asking me about how was school . . . I was having bad friends, they used to go to the rivers and do anything, like smoking . . . when we go there to the river, he [uncle] followed and found me swimming there and smoking and he lashed me. So I started to leave those friends and get good friends. (17-year-old boy)

Suffering is commonplace

Pervasive poverty characterizes the areas in which participants were resident, particularly its township and former-homeland communities (Hall & Posel, 2012). In these contexts, disadvantage and suffering are the norm. Being embedded in a context in which hardship was normative apparently made adversity less of a personal burden and more like a common fate. Rather than adopt victim-identities, or resist hardship in non-constructive ways (e.g., crime, streetism), resilient youth made meaning in ways that encouraged equanimity (see Table 1).

Paradoxically, this same reality probably accounts for their under-reporting of control and efficacy, and non-reporting of social justice. How easy is it for young people who inhabit a context that is structurally deficient and perennially disadvantaged, to effect change, or to experience their world as fair? One 16-year-old boy explained it like this: “I have decided to accept [difficulties associated with poverty] because there is nothing I can do.” Some young people made occasional reference to an international NGO that had assisted them to solve their immediate problems (e.g., access to food, clothing, and learning materials), but this activism did not extend to advocacy for the need to challenge the continuation of life-worlds in which suffering is normative.

Cultural Influences on Resilience Processes

The distinguishing features of the resilience processes of young people can be explained further by their traditionally African life-worlds. Black African communities that subscribe to traditional African ways of being and doing are characterized by strong women, an ethic of human and spiritual care, and an education-facilitated forward-focus (Ramphele, 2012; Swartz & Bhana, 2009).

Strong women

For historical, political reasons, SA Black women necessarily had to function as the bedrock of their families and communities. This prompted an archetype of hardy Black SA women who could be relied on, no matter what (Casale, 2011; Ramphele, 2012; Swartz & Bhana, 2009). Although this archetype is not exclusive to Black women in South Africa (see, for example, Abrams, Maxwell, Pope, & Belgrave, 2014), it does inspire cultural expectations that Black women continue to champion their children, communities, and nation (Gqola, 2011). Participants’ accounts of their resilience illustrate the benefits of this culture (see Table 1).

An ethic of human and spiritual care

Young people’s descriptions of their supports emphasized nurturing women kin, compassionate service providers whose acts and attitudes were kin-like, and benevolent spiritual beings (God and ancestors). This aligns with emerging understandings of harmony-loving aspects being indigenous to SA personality structure (Nel et al., 2012). There were occasional references to experiences of a lack of care from family members (including women) and service providers. For example, in her explanation of why she and other girls had been abused, a 19-year-old girl said, “We have families, but they don’t really care about us.” Her words signpost the recognition that young people’s well-being was jeopardized when anticipated cultural constructions were flouted. Essentially, however, resilient youth experienced, and anticipated, a culture of care (see Table 1). This dovetails with Ubuntu principles that teach interpersonal solidarity and selflessness (i.e., regarding and treating all others as kin), as well as ancestral and divine munificence, provided that people hold their ancestors and God in esteem (Bujo, 2009). Such esteem is expressed in regular engagement in religious and ancestral practices (Louw, 2011).

Importantly, this culture of care was not limited to young people’s informal social ecological supports (e.g., mothers, grandmothers). Adults who offered formal social ecological support (e.g., teachers, social workers) enacted this cultural ethic of care, too. Their operationalization of this ethic included parent-like acts of providing youth with money, food, and other essential resources (see Table 1).

Only one young person was skeptical about the value of divine resources, not because of experiences of divine neglect, but because he had begun to question the existence of a god for which there was no scientific proof, and because nobody in his social ecology could support his quest for knowledge. He explained,

She [aunt] tried to tell us to attend church and [to] read the Bible for us and, uh, if she read the Bible, I just ran away (laughter) . . . I don’t believe that there is a God. I would like to understand who wrote this Bible. All the priests don’t answer me that question, so I don’t understand . . . I think maybe if I can get a pastor who will try to make me understand that, I will be able to get to church, because sometimes I have that feeling to go to the church.

Education potentiates prospective, powerful identities

Education was prominent in young people’s understanding of how to reform their current powerlessness, and/or that of their families. They anticipated that education would support avoidance of powerless identities (e.g., a street child, a criminal, a penniless parent; see Table 1), and enable status and concomitant opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the lives of family and community. In the light of this, some emphasis on school pressures (e.g., failing a test), in youth reporting of what challenges their well-being, is understandable.

Education’s prominence was probably prompted by the emphasis African communities traditionally place on education as a means to a better life (Biko, 1979; Gqola, 2011). Their social ecologies (teachers, caregivers, and pro-social peers) reinforced education’s standing. For example, a 16-year-old boy said,

I was very feeling [strongly feeling] like leaving school so I could start working and earn some money. A teacher at school motivated me and told me that school is very important . . . [so now] school is very important. It doesn’t really matter how many times I fail, but I’m not going to leave school.

Discussion

The voices of participating Black SA young people provide a clear answer to the first question that directed this article: With the exceptions of social justice and control/efficacy, their resilience is informed by the same mechanisms as those reported by Ungar et al. (2007). Clearly, these majority-world youth do have resilience-supporting mechanisms in common with other majority- and minority-world young people. This reminds resilience theorists not to disregard existing theory when they are seeking to understand why/how specific groups of youth adjust well to adversity.

The amplification of the contextual realities of absent men and commonplace suffering, the emphasis on the cultural reality of strong women and human and spiritual care, and the valorization of education by these young people facilitate an answer to this article’s second question. These realities refine the reported mechanisms so that the adjustment of participating youth is understood, less broadly, as being facilitated by the following: (a) women-kin-/service-provider-facilitated access to material resources; (b) caring women-kin-/caring service-provider-dominated relationships; (c) tolerant meaning-making; (d) a prospective, education-facilitated powerful identity; and (e) allegiance to an ancestral and Christian culture. This refined understanding highlights the importance of attending to how culture and context shape universally reported resilience processes (Masten, 2014; Panter-Brick, 2015; Ungar, 2011). Beyond the obvious benefits, for example, knowing which protective resources should be included in resilience-supporting interventions with specific groups of youth in specific contexts, such attention potentiates culturally and contextually relevant, social ecological leverage of resilience.

To illustrate, the current study prompts four specific leverage points. These points purposefully foreground social ecologies, given burgeoning arguments that social ecologies need to exercise greater accountability for youth resilience (Ungar, 2013). Although these points are specific to the rural, post-apartheid, traditionally African context and culture of the current study, they are transferable to cohorts of similar/similarly marginalized youth. They will probably also be useful to service providers working with dissimilar cohorts in that they illustrate the importance of understanding, and supporting, positive adjustment in non-general, non-stereotypical, socially just ways.

First, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts are significant actors in the resilience processes of young people. This is not a new finding (Theron & Theron, 2010), or one that is exclusive to Black, SA youth (Werner, 2013), but its consideration flags the importance of sustaining women’s constructive contributions to young people’s resilience processes. This implies a need for research studies that investigate what these women would consider helpful in this regard. Simultaneously, this finding demands interest in the men who are not integral to the resilience processes of young people. Knowing that women are crucial to youth resilience does not validate endless replication of this status quo. Fathers, grandfathers, and other men need to become significant actors, too, particularly as the participants’ sparse references to resilience-supporting men flagged their value. As urged by Panter-Brick et al.’s (2014) review of parenting interventions, women’s pre-eminence compels investigation into the structural and social forces (such as poverty, damage payments, migrancy) that shape (rural) men’s disengagement in the resilience processes of young people and the use of this knowledge to support men to co-leverage youth resilience.

Second, Black SA youth’s voices indicate that service providers make a resilience-supporting difference when they behave in kin-like, caring ways that reflect the cultural ethic youth were socialized to anticipate. Their voices echo the points made in an emerging literature that argues that the resilience-promoting value of services lies in their relational quality and not service provision per se (Liebenberg & Ungar, 2014; Sanders, Munford, Liebenberg, & Ungar, 2014; Ungar, Liebenberg, Dudding, Armstrong, & Van de Vijver, 2013). Significantly, youth in the current study implied that relational quality also depended on culturally relevant, atypical service acts (e.g., service providers being kin-like and sharing personal funds). A similar conclusion was made about how teachers facilitated the resilience of a group of Black SA students (Theron & Theron, 2014). As noted in the latter study, this suggests that service providers—in very impoverished communities at any rate—probably not only need to serve youth in ways that extend textbook-scoped service provision in order to champion resilience but also need to be buttressed to sustain such support.

Third, young people’s education-affiliated hopes spotlight the obligation of social ecologies to offer accessible, quality education (and not just education) as a means of leveraging resilience (Wright et al., 2013). The recommendations of earlier studies of resilience among Black SA youth underscored the importance of educational pathways without raising the caveat that blind commendation of education potentially sets youth up for failure (see, for example, Phasha, 2010). This is partly because the education available to SA youth from disadvantaged, rural communities is too inferior to support hopes of upward trajectories (Spaull, 2013). Given this, how viable are participants’ dreams of education affording them a powerful identity someday? It also raises questions about the morality of perpetuating cultural values (e.g., the valorization of education) when a broader social ecology disregards them (e.g., valorizing education in the absence of government provision of quality education). In such contexts, this potentially sets youth up for failure. In their study of the resilience processes of Afghan youth, Panter-Brick and Eggerman (2012) called this “entrapment” (p. 383) and warned that the non-critical maintenance of cultural values leverages vulnerability rather than resilience.

Finally, young people’s failure to mention social justice and their negligible mention of control/efficacy imply that their social ecology failed to advocate for social change and for life-worlds in which they have the power to effect change. Such social ecological failure to leverage resilience is not reported in prior studies of Black SA youth’s resilience. In a sense, this indicates that the resilience of young people was limited to their adjusting to toxic life-worlds, albeit with social ecological support, and/or trusting spiritual beings (God and ancestors) to resolve challenges that threatened to overwhelm them. Put differently, young people’s accounts of their resilience reproduce stereotypical assumptions that resilience is about youth adjusting well rather than about their life-worlds being adjusted (Fisher, Busch-Rossnagel, Jopp, & Brown, 2012). Social ecologies disregard a vital opportunity to accept greater responsibility for the resilience processes of young people and act on this (as suggested by Ungar, 2013) when they fail to challenge, and change, systems that predict youth vulnerability. It is probable that this neglect is not exclusive to the context of this study’s participants. Across the world, societies’ discriminatory acts and attitudes increasingly jeopardize young people’s healthy development. This has sparked calls for socially just change to replace stereotypical expectations that young people adjust to unfair societies (Fisher et al., 2012; Masten, 2014).

Conclusion

The findings of this study are not without limitations. These include a sample that is weighted toward youth whose community identified them as resilient. A more diverse sample could possibly have generated a different set of findings. In particular, the potentially unique resources of what have been called quietly resilient youth (i.e., those less likely to be noticed by adults but who are nonetheless well adjusted despite difficult circumstances) are probably not reported in this study.⁴ Moreover, the data that visual methods prompt are often biased toward more recent experiences (Mitchell, 2011). The data also offer no longitudinal perspectives (see Panter-Brick, 2015). Nevertheless, as they are, these findings have value. They privilege the voices of majority-world young people. In doing so, they illustrate that universally reported resilience mechanisms (Ungar et al., 2007) do account for the positive adjustment of Black SA young people but in ways that mirror these young people’s women-dominated, disadvantaged context and its traditional African culture. They flag that resilience processes demand robust social ecological support that includes championship of youth-enabling social change. When social ecologies accept that their responsibility toward the resilience of young people should extend to the creation of sociocultural ecologies that optimize youth well-being, and act on this, then the voices of young people will have been respected.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada (Grant 104518-015).

Notes

Author Biography

Linda C. Theron, D.Ed. (Educational Psychology), is a full professor in Optentia Research Focus Area, North-West University, South Africa. Her research explores why, and how, some South African young people adjust well to chronic adversity (see www.Lindatheron.org / ). She is lead editor of Youth Resilience and Culture: Complexities and Commonalities (Springer, 2014).

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Toward a Culturally and Contextually Sensitive Understanding of Resilience

Abstract

Keywords

A Brief Review of the Relevant Literature

Generic Resilience Mechanisms

The Inadequacy of Generic Mechanisms to Completely Explain Resilience

Method

Contextualization of the Pathways to Resilience Study, South Africa

Participants

Qualitative Methods

Semi-structured interviews

Draw-and-Write

Mmogo-methodTM

Data Analysis

Trustworthiness

Findings

Distinctive Expressions of Universal Resilience Processes

Contextual Influences on Resilience Processes

Absent men

Suffering is commonplace

Cultural Influences on Resilience Processes

Strong women

An ethic of human and spiritual care

Education potentiates prospective, powerful identities

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

Author Biography

References

Mmogo-method^TM