The resilience of emerging adults inhabiting a stressed industrialized environment in Eswatini

Abstract

The aim of my study was to explore emerging adults’ accounts of resilience to the challenges of a stressed industrialized environment in Eswatini. This aim relates to how Matsapha (the stressed industrialised environment) exposes emerging adult Swazis to numerous challenges, yet how Swazi young people navigate these stressors successfully has never been researched. To address this gap, I adopted a social constructivist stance and explored emerging adults’ subjective meanings of the risks that characterise Matsapha and what enables resilience to those risks. To facilitate this exploration, I used a qualitative approach and phenomenological design. Thirty emerging adults (15 young men and 15 young women; aged 18-24), who had lived in Matsapha for at least a year, consented to participate in my study. Through a mix of focus group interviews and participatory research methods (i.e., photo-elicitation and mapping activities), emerging adults shared their experiences of Matsapha-related stressors and what enabled resilience to those stressors. Using inductive thematic analysis, I found that even though Matsapha was an unavoidable environment in which physical, financial, and relational stressors were rife, enabling connections, personal drive, and a resourced ecology supported emerging adult resilience to those stressors. While these relational, personal, and ecological resources fit with what has commonly been reported about resilience, they also advanced attention to its complexity. In this regard, they underscored that the resources that supported Swazi young people to adjust well to their stressed industrialised environment were developmentally apposite and contextually (i.e., situationally and culturally) responsive. Further, these resources collectively supported young people’s positive adjustment, thereby showing emerging adult resilience to be co-facilitated. Even though independence is a hallmark of emerging adulthood, in stressed environments (like Matsapha) emerging adult resilience cannot be construed as a personal responsibility only. Overall, my study’s findings advocate for emerging adult resilience to be understood as a co-facilitated, developmentally and contextually responsive process. In industrialised contexts in Africa, government and other formal supports must urgently become more supportively involved in its co-facilitation.