Diagnosing resilience : a secondary analysis of psycho-educational assessments using Ungar's resilience criteria

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.