New Book Features Work on Resilience

All resilient people share the ability to bounce back despite many challenges in their life, and mental health experts are increasingly focusing on how to build human strengths and happiness by learning from these individuals.

FMHI staff Mary Armstrong and Roger Boothroyd have participated in a number of studies on resilience, and recently contributed their findings to a book that explores multiple paths children follow to health and well-being in diverse national and international settings. Published by SAGE Publications, The Handbook For Working With Children and Youth: Pathways To Resilience Across Cultures and Contexts examines lives lived well despite much adversity.

The book stems from work on the International Resilience Project (IRP), a multi-year international research study funded by the government of Canada through Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada, and headed by Dr. Michael Ungar, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie. Dr. Ungar was interested in resilience across cultures, and wanted to know if there are cultural differences, as well as commonalities that influence resilience.

Armstrong and Boothroyd were part of the project’s team of community and university based researchers, clinicians, service providers and child advocates from twenty-five communities around the world studying resilience in high-risk youth populations facing war, violence, cultural disintegration, structural inequalities and mental health challenges.

The IRP included the development, piloting and subsequent use of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM), a tool measuring child resilience in individual, relational, community and cultural areas in the diverse sample of 1503 youth in 14 sites globally.

South Florida was selected as one of the study areas, and Armstrong and Boothroyd were asked to expand upon and contribute findings on their existing work with the FL Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) project: Welfare Reform: Adolescent Girls in Transition – A Three Year Follow-up Study. Every year for 4 years, project staff had conducted 2 sets of interviews on mothers enrolled in welfare who had daughters, and their daughters. They looked at how daughters are impacted by welfare initiatives, and studied factors including depression, self esteem and youth risk. At the completion of the study, 20 girls were then picked to follow up with more in-depth interviews for the IRP. Girls were chosen who had experienced a number of adverse conditions, and were still doing ok.

"In Florida, despite deep poverty and fading hope, participants, some of whom were teenaged mothers, talked about being a good parent and wanting to distance themselves from dependency and welfare,” said Dr. Ungar in the book’s opening remarks.

"It’s important that when women enroll in welfare, they should be asked if they have an adolescent daughter,” said Armstrong. “In our study, we wanted to learn what should be in place prevention/intervention wise for these daughters. I began to realize there were parallels in the resilience theory and System Of Care practices, and that’s what we focused on in the book.”

Along with Armstrong and Boothroyd, Beth Stroul, a leading expert in children’s mental health, co-authored the chapter, Intercepts of Resilience and Systems of Care. Ungar describes the chapter as one that “explores the concepts of system of care and of child resilience and examines the ways in which these concepts intersect. The chapter begins with a review of the concepts of system of care and resilience, providing a brief background, a summary of key elements, and a review of recent clarifications of each of these concepts. The chapter concludes with a set of recommendations regarding how a synthesis of the two concepts can lead to improved systems and treatment services and supports for at-risk children and their families.”

" We hope to continue these types of studies,” said Armstrong. "They are an important part to understanding youth's own experiences of survival and the dynamic nature of their struggles. Findings have implications for which services should be offered and the need to provide a matrix of alternatives for youth to achieve health.”