The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has had a global impact that has affected all areas of people’s lives. However, people have different capacities to adapt and cope with the adversities and traumatic events that may have occurred during the pandemic with different levels of resilience. One collective affected by this global crisis was university students, who had to face an unprecedented academic situation, resulting in some abandoning their studies. This study aims to analyse whether the resilience of the students could be related to academic dropout. To carry out this research, we assessed the resilience of 1676 university students from 11 universities in Ecuador. To do so, a committee of experts from the Ecuadorian Association of Social Work Education Centres and 11 Ecuadorian universities designed a questionnaire and sent it to the entire sample. Subsequently, we compared the levels of resilience between university students who withdrew from university during the COVID-19 pandemic with those who continued their studies by using a multivariate analysis. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences in all variables analysed. The students who obtained the highest scores were those who continued their studies, and those students who dropped out obtained the lowest scores. In summary, we found that school dropout among Ecuadorian university students during the COVID-19 pandemic was due to low levels of resilience. Therefore, increasing student resilience could improve university retention rates and, in turn, academic performance and future life prospects.

Cultural identity represents a construct that is difficult to measure because the nature of the variables involved is complex and mostly subjective. Indigenous people belonging to communities in the Amazon have seen their identity drastically eroded in recent decades as a result of the process of Western acculturation. In this context, the quantification of this loss arises by identifying the most and least affected identity components of this process. This research work presents a quantitative method, based on artificial intelligence, which evaluates the cultural identity of an Amazonian indigenous community: the Woaroani. On the basis of an instrument developed in the field by the authors, this method automatically classifies the individuals and provides a subspace of it able to identify the weights of the subcomponents of this instrument in regard to its contribution to the Waorani identity. The systematic application of the instrument together with the AI-based system can provide decision-makers with valuable information about which aspects of their identity are most sensitive to change and thus help design development policies that minimally interfere with their ethnic identity.

Cultural identity is a complex concept that includes subjective factors such as ideology, family knowledge, customs, language, and acquired skills, among others. Measuring culture involves a significant level of difficulty, since its study and scope differ from the point of view, the time and the place where the studies are carried out. In the Amazon, indigenous communities are in an accelerated process of acculturation that results in a loss of cultural identity that is not easy to quantify. This paper presents a method to measure the cultural distance between individuals or between groups of people using Artificial Intelligence techniques. The distance between individuals is calculated as the distance of the minimum path in the self-organizing map using Dijkstra’s algorithm. The experiments have been carried out to measure the cultural identity of indigenous people in the Waorani Amazon community and compares them with people living in cities who have a modern identity. The results showed that the communities are still distant in terms of identity from the westernised cities around them, although there are already factors where the distances are minimal concerning these cities. In any case, the method makes it possible to quantify the state of acculturation. This quantification can help the authorities to monitor these communities and take political decisions that will enable them to preserve their cultural identity.

Latin American indigenous people have undergone changes in their cultural identity, especially as a result of their contact with Western cultures. As such, a measuring instrument is required to determine the extent of this change. In the Amazon, difficulties in obtaining field data have not allowed the establishment of cultural indicators. This paper presents an instrument designed from the indigenous perspective that allows us to measure their cultural identity. The qualitative study focusing on the Ecuadorian Amazon resulted in an instrument that provides information on thirty subscale and five cultural scales, and was successfully tested for validity and reliability. Finally, it was applied to three populations with different degrees of contact with Western society in order to determine their differences.

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