Abstract:
Educational psychologists are expected to offer real-world relevant services. One
way to strive towards real-word relevance is for educational psychologists to
facilitate resilience by using Ungar’s diagnostic criteria of resilience. However, at
this time the usefulness of applying Ungar’s criteria is still unexplored. Thus, this
study asked: ‘What insight into the resilience of vulnerable rural adolescents can be
achieved by applying Ungar’s diagnostic criteria of resilience to the documents (i.e.
paper-and-pencil activities) generated in psycho-educational assessments?’ In
answering this question, a qualitative secondary data analysis was conducted of
psycho-educational paper-and-pencil activities completed by 65 male and female
IsiSwati-speaking Grade 9 learners at a secondary school in Mpumalanga, a remote
province in South Africa, during the Flourishing Learning Youth (FLY) study. FLY, a
project of the Centre for the Study of Resilience, is based at the University of
Pretoria. The a priori categories were sourced from Ungar’s diagnostic criteria and
the relevant a priori codes from the review of South African resilience literature. The
analysis showed that adolescents were challenged by physical risk, emotional risk
and poverty-related risk. Additionally, adolescents were protected by personal
resources (agency, self-worth), family resources (role models, supportive parentchild
interaction), community resources (role models, community belonging), school
resources (teachers as role models and supporters) and macro resources
(spirituality). These findings echo extant South African resilience studies and
enabled the educational psychologist to ‘diagnose’ resilience for this group of
adolescents to better understand the risks to their well-being, the resources that can
be leveraged to buffer this risk, and the resources that are absent and must be
negotiated.
