Multisystemic approaches to researching young people’s resilience: Discovering culturally and contextually sensitive accounts of thriving under adversity

Abstract

As our understanding of the process of resilience has become more culturally and contextually grounded, researchers have had to seek innovative ways to account for the complex, reciprocal relationship between the many systems that influence young people’s capacity to thrive. This paper briefly traces the history of a more contextualized understanding of resilience and then reviews a social–ecological model to explain multisystemic resilience. A case study is then used to show how a multisystemic understanding of resilience can influence the design and implementation of resilience research. The Resilient Youth in Stressed Environments study is a longitudinal mixed methods investigation of adolescents and emerging adults in communities that depend on oil and gas industries in Canada and South Africa. These communities routinely experience stress at individual, family, and institutional levels from macroeconomic factors related to boom-and-bust economic cycles. Building on the project’s methods and findings, we discuss how to create better studies of resilience which are able to capture both emic and etic accounts of positive developmental processes in ways that avoid the tendency to homogenize children’s experience. Limitations to doing multisystemic resilience research are also highlighted, with special attention to the need for further innovation.

An examination of the effects of family, school, and community resilience on high school students’ resilience in China

“…In addition, the social support a youngster receives from their community members might influence their behavioral and psychological success. However, multisystemic resilience is crucial for fostering and enhancing individual resilience ( Ungar et al, 2023 ). Research must consider socio-ecological and multi-system views to gain a comprehensive understanding of individual resilience and enhance it.…”

Pathways to resilience and pathways to flourishing: Examining the added-value of multisystem research and intervention in contexts of war and forced displacement

“…To quote one humanitarian policy brief, “resilience brings the entire political-societal system into focus and moves interventions away from discrete conflict problems and project-based responses. The key question becomes what intervention or accumulation of interventions will tip the conflict system to a nonviolent system that is improving over time, which requires a systems-level, not a project-level, theory of change” (van Metre, 2016, p. 3). For the international organization Mercy Corps, building resilience means designing interventions across multiple systems, at economic, social, political, and ecological levels (Panter-Brick, 2021).…”

“…For example, the Resilient Youth in Stressed Environment project is a longitudinal, mixed-methods study of youth in communities experiencing the boom-bust cycles of the oil and gas industry, in Canada, South Africa, and Russia. It calls for observing a "cascade of effects" at multiple levels of analyses for discerning ways to analyze data from multiple sources (Ungar et al, 2023). In longitudinal analyses of human development outcomes, systems-led resilience modeling will thus be focused on understanding change and flow, capturing all at once the biological, behavioral, cognitive, psychological, cultural, economic, social and political aspects of individual, family, and community life.…”

Children surviving war and Peace Education: goals for sustainable development

“…Il costrutto della resilienza sta gradualmente permeando anche nelle politiche, nelle ricerche e nelle iniziative pratiche in favore dei bambini che vivono in aree (post) di conflitto. Se la ricerca contemporanea riconosce sempre di più la natura sistemica del costrutto (Ungar, 2008;Ungar, Theron, & Höltge, 2023) la maggior parte degli studi e degli interventi rivolti ai bambini colpiti dalla guerra, secondo Vindevogel (2017), procedono soprattutto utilizzando un approccio individuale sotteso alla resilienza e molto meno uno ecologico-sociale (Malaguti, 2020;. Secondo la prospettiva individuale, essa corrisponde alla capacità individuale di adattarsi ad un contesto, reagendo con successo a circostanze avverse come, ad esempio, quelle di una guerra (Bang & Collet, 2020;Martin & Marsh, 2009;Zolkoski & Bullock, 2012).…”