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.