Resilience-enabling relationships of older adolescents

Abstract

My study is a sub-study of the Resilient Youth in Stressed Environments (RYSE) Project (ethics clearance, UP17/05/01). RYSE aims to better understand the resilience of youth who live in environments that are stressed by the petrochemical industry and other related risks. In particular, the purpose of my study was to explore the relationships that enhance older adolescents’ resilience in the midst of the double risk posed by township residence and petrochemical pollution. I used phenomenology as my research design and a socio-constructivist epistemology as the paradigm for my study. My eight participants, who were purposively recruited because they were older (18 to 24 years) and hailed from eMbalenhle township, participated in a photo elicitation activity and a group interview. I deduced themes from the resulting data by applying the relational codes from the RYSE Canadian codebook. Family relationships (mostly with mother figures), relationships with reliable friends, and relationships with community members emerged as the main themes, while the relationship with God was an outlier theme. There was no evidence of online relationships, relationships with pets and animals, or relationships with mental health professionals in my data, but these relationships were indicated in the codebook. The themes that I deduced are useful to the resilience theory as they affirm that resilience is a contextual phenomenon. Therefore, sociocultural aspects should not be neglected when one seeks to understand this complex phenomenon.