Resilience and Culture

Resilience and Culture Ungar

  • What do others from other fields make of this operational definition of culture, as the everyday practices that bring order to our experience. 

emic: study from within; etic: attempt to study from without (‘objectively’)

Cross-cultural protective factors

  1. Relationships: Though relationships with a primary caregiver were important, so too were other sources of social capital like prosocial peers, adult mentors, teachers, and extended family .

  2. A powerful identity: Having a sense of one’s self as being competent and respected for one’s skills were common experiences among youth doing well. Youth emphasized the need to have access to opportunities that reinforced competencies. Recognition from others fostered self-reflection among the youth and reinforced self-esteem.

  3. Personal control and efficacy: The youth’s ability to exercise some say over his or her world was important to experiences of empowerment. The better these experiences were facilitated by the adolescent’s environment (e.g., the youth was listened to and his or her recommendations to care providers taken seri- ously) the more the adolescent reported being able to cope under stress.

  4. Social justice: Youth who experienced themselves as being treated fairly in their communities attributed those experiences to their capacity to do well.

  5. Access to material resources: Youth who did well enjoyed access to adequate food, clothing, education, and future opportunities for employment. This access was facilitated through family or community relationships or through govern- ment policies and contact with formal service providers.

  6.  Sense of cohesion: Adolescents who reported a sense of belonging within a community of relationships, or at school, those that expressed their spirituality or a religious affiliation, and those that found life meaningful, coped better.

Cultural adherence: Identification with a set of group beliefs and norms was described as protective when experiencing marginalization or stress.

This study seems to be applying an etic interpretation to emic factors. Identifying similarities across diverse presentations. Could it be otherwise? Resilience seems a bit based on idea of subjectivity. 

Understood as a social ecological concept, resilience is the ability of individuals (on their own and collectively) to navigate to the culturally relevant resources they need to do well when confronting adversity, as well as their capacity to negotiate for these resources to be provided in ways that are meaningful (Ungar, 2008, 2011)

Critique of earlier studies:       - ignore homogeneity of dominant culture      - within group resistance to subgroup norms      - cultural differences in discursive power

From methodological critiques section:  This new treatment of culture re ects the need to “unpackage” culture, that is, to consider culture as a mul- tidimensional evolving source of in uence on developmental processes within any culture rather than as a monolithic nomi- nal variable. The unpacking of culture also requires researchers to operationalize culture in concrete variables. (p. 3)