Abstract
This social-ecological inquiry explores youth resiliency in diverse communities using innovative qualitative visual methodologies. It engages adolescents in a process of sharing their daily experiences and reflecting on the resources they bring to bear to thrive in the face of geographic and social relocations. The four youth participants were identified by local community advisors as especially resilient teenagers despite experiencing transitions that could provoke risks to normative development. The youths were interviewed and videotaped during a weekend day in [their] lives. They also engaged in deliberations on that day; took part in a photo elicitation that reflected on significant people, places, and objects in their environments; and responded to a resilience questionnaire. These visual data and the youths’ deliberations were analyzed for themes of positive identity and personal control observed within and across communities by their passing on the nurturant interchanges they themselves had experienced during that day.
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Notes
The original Day in the Life project initiative was lead by Catherine Ann Cameron, University of British Columbia, Canada and Julia Gillen, Lancaster University, UK, and is reliant on the work their international team of colleagues: Guiliana Pinto, University of Florence, Italy; Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi, University of Florence, Italy; Sombat Tapanya, Chiang Mai University, Thailand; Roger Hancock, Open University, UK; Susan Young, University of Exeter, UK; Leslie Cameron, Carthage College, USA; and Ayshe Talay-Ongan, ex Macquarie University, Australia. The project website gives further information including ethical dimensions of the project at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/dayinthelife/.
The Resilience Research Centre, at Dalhousie University can be accessed at its website at http://www.resilienceproject.org/. The current DITL adolescence resiliency study, entitled Negotiating Resilience, is supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grant to Michael Ungar, Principal Investigator, Linda Liebenberg, Co-Investigator, Dalhousie University and Catherine Ann Cameron, Co-Investigator, at University of British Columbia.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, funder of this research and to Michael Ungar, Director of the Resilience Research Centre, for his leadership in assembling the international team in the eight communities that collaborate on this investigation of resilient mobile youth. A preliminary version of this paper was presented by S. Tapanya, C. Lau, and C. A. Cameron in July, 2008 as “Day in the life of resilient adolescents in eight diverse communities around the globe” in an Invited Symposium chaired by M. Ungar, entitled Pathways to resilience across cultures: Lessons from studies of positive development under adverse circumstances at the International Congress of Psychology in Berlin, Germany. We are especially grateful to the participating teenagers and their sympathetic parents, to research collaborators Nora Didkowsky, Erin Rapoport, Rakchanok Chayutkul and the Advisory Committees in Vancouver Canada (Dr. Pilar Riano-Alcala, Lolita Gambroudes, Miriam Maurer, Anntuanetha Figueroa, and Victor Porter) and in Chiang Mai Thailand (Kasaem Netsakkasaem and Soontorn Intanat).
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Cameron, C.A., Lau, C. & Tapanya, S. Passing It On During a Day In The Life of Resilient Adolescents in Diverse Communities Around the Globe. Child Youth Care Forum 38, 305–325 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-009-9084-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-009-9084-8