Social Ecologies and Their Contribution to Resilience
01 Jan 2012-pp 13-31
TL;DR: The authors define resilience as a set of behaviors over time that depend on the opportunities that are available and accessible to individuals, their families, and communities. But they do not define what people mean when they say "do well when facing adversity".
Abstract: The chapter begins with a detailed expression of resilience that defines it as a set of behaviors over time that depends on the opportunities that are available and accessible to individuals, their families, and communities. Building on the research of other scholars and the Resilience Research Centre (Dalhousie University), the author shows the importance of understanding resilience as a contextually and culturally embedded construct and the need to capture what people mean when they say “doing well when facing adversity.”
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TL;DR: Using this multisystemic social-ecological theory of resilience can inform a deeper understanding of the processes that contribute to positive development under stress and offer practitioners and policy makers a broader perspective on principles for the design and implementation of effective interventions.
Abstract: Background: The development of Bronfenbrenner’s bio-social-ecological systems model of human development parallels advances made to the theory of resilience that progressively moved from a more in ...
553 citations
Cites background from "Social Ecologies and Their Contribu..."
...A recent volume of studies on the social ecology of resilience (Ungar, 2012) highlights many of these same patterns....
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...Congruent with Bronfenbrenner’s notion of development in context, Ungar (2012) proposes that we assess resilience as both the quality of the interaction between the child and the child’s environment, and the competence of each side of the individual · environment equation to provide what is…...
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...These multiple systems themselves form complex triangles in which microlevel systems such as families, community organizations and peer groups exchange resources in ways that enhance an individual’s growth and mitigate risk exposure (Ungar, 2012)....
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...Over time, more and more emphasis has been placed on distal factors like class, race and culture that influence proximal processes related to biopsychological triggers, expressions of personality and cognitive styles (Clauss-Ehlers, 2008; McCubbin et al., 1998; Panter-Brick & Eggerman, 2012; Ungar, 2012)....
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...…more and more emphasis has been placed on distal factors like class, race and culture that influence proximal processes related to biopsychological triggers, expressions of personality and cognitive styles (Clauss-Ehlers, 2008; McCubbin et al., 1998; Panter-Brick & Eggerman, 2012; Ungar, 2012)....
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: Since the early 1970s, Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, Collins and others have been following a large cohort of children from the sixth month of the mother’s pregnancy through to the present, demonstrating that development is a lawful, understandable and predictable process when there have been multiple methods of assessment from multiple independent sources.
Abstract: Since the early 1970s, Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, Collins and others have been following a large cohort of children from the sixth month of the mother’s pregnancy through to the present. Eighty-five percent of the 212 at 24 months are still in the study close to three decades later. Early losses occurred before the decision was made to change the initial shorter study (started by Egeland, a psychologist, and Deinard, a pediatrician) to a longitudinal study. The authors noted that the losses were in the most high stress and unstable of the families.
The families were chosen intentionally to include caregivers who may present parenting difficulties by selecting first born children to mothers who qualified for public assistance for prenatal care and delivery. Poverty was the marker that would ensure this. They were careful to note that these mothers had a wide variety of backgrounds and degrees of support available, thus also ensuring a wide range of outcomes 28 years later (the age now under study).
The authors started with an excellent overview of the challenges faced, the key claims and guide to the book, conceptual and theoretical supports, organizing perspective and assessments. Understanding the frequency, breadth and depth of the assessments with over 10,000 resultant variables is crucial to giving credence to the resulting conclusions. The strength of this work comes not just from the lessons learned about development, change and continuity but from the impressive evidence that places the lessons on a firm foundation and the even more fascinating predictability about development that emerged from the data.
Throughout the book, it is easily possible to pull out sentences that may have made intuitive clinical sense but are now backed up with statistics (kept to an appropriate minimum since background papers are well-referenced). For instance: by heightening and chronically emitting signals of need toward an only intermittently responsive caregiver, a resistant attachment organization is established which is correlated with anxiety disorders at age 17½. By minimizing signals of need that may further alienate rejecting caregivers, an avoidant attachment organization is established which shows a connection to externalizing behavioural disorders through early childhood and adolescence. Anxious attachment in general, with no distinction between avoidance and resistance, was associated with depression. There are remarkable parallels between how mothers responded to tasks with their children at 24 months and the same children more than 20 years later, responding to their own 24-month-old children.
Other conclusions have implications for prevention and intervention. In breaking the cycle of abuse, three relationship factors were most helpful for the mothers: (1) receiving emotional support from an alternative non-abusive adult, therapy experience of at least six months, supportive and satisfying relationship with a mate; (2) ability to predict high school dropping out with 77% accuracy using only quality of care measures up to age 42 months; (3) boundary violators during middle childhood were less competent in dealing with mixed gender relationships during adolescence and were more likely to have mothers who were abused.
As interesting as any individual observation or prediction may have been, it is the general observations and conclusions about development that pull the work together and provide a framework that will be useful to clinicians, program planners and researchers for years to come. They include implications for classification systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, for treatment of specific disorders and for prevention and early intervention services. Above all, they have demonstrated that development is a lawful, understandable and predictable process when there have been multiple methods of assessment from multiple independent sources.
This is a book that I wish was written and that I had read as a resident. It’s not that there weren’t books about development, but they were based on the wisdom of clinical observation by gifted clinicians after years of work. What this group has contributed is the research basis for development, and in the process have given it a much more interactive and dynamic life than theory and clinicians have been able to do. They shift us from traits to interactions, from today’s preoccupation with genetics to the psychosocial environment, from blaming parents to acceptance of their unique histories and pasts, and, more importantly, from the unpredictable to the predictable.
Some time ago, when giving an invited talk about personality disorder from the perspective of a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I ended with the thought that we may be training our residents from the wrong end of life. They start out in the world of adult psychiatry and work backwards gradually. My thought was that we needed to start with infancy and the attachment process, then work forward into childhood, adolescence and adulthood. This book has shifted my ‘clinical’ thought into a research base. If we understood the results of this book and the developmental process and predictability, we would practice a more researched based therapy with each growing stage of life.
This book represents the summary of a lifetime dedication by many researchers to the mental health and well-being of children and youth and makes this dedication available to all of us who work with and care about children and youth in society. They deserve not only our thanks, but more importantly, our attention.
Now that the work has been done, the book has been written, it is time for you to read it and then recommend it to every psychiatry resident beginning their career.
498 citations
TL;DR: The authors provides a critical review of resilience theory, drawing on an array of key authors, dating back fifty years, addressing three aspects of resilience: its definition, the construction of adversity and outcomes, and the nature and scope of resilience processes.
Abstract: As resilience theory gains traction as a theoretical framework for research in social work, it is important to engage with it critically. This article provides a critical review of resilience theory, drawing on an array of key authors, dating back fifty years. The review addresses three aspects of resilience theory: its definition, the construction of adversity and outcomes, and the nature and scope of resilience processes. The relevance of resilience theory for social work in South Africa is evaluated according to three criteria: the research questions it generates, its contribution to indigenous knowledge and decolonisation, and its contribution to social development
164 citations
TL;DR: The authors presented a model of early career teacher resilience where resilience is seen as a process located at the interface of personal and contextual challenges and resources and discussed the critical roles played by family and friends and the importance of relationships in the resilience process.
Abstract: Early career teachers face a range of challenges in their first years of teaching and how these challenges are managed as career implications. Based on current literature, this paper presents a model of early career teacher resilience where resilience is seen as a process located at the interface of personal and contextual challenges and resources. Through a semi-structured interview the challenges faced by 13 Australian early career teachers and the resources available to manage these challenges are examined. Findings show that beginning teachers experience multiple, varied and ongoing challenges and that personal and contextual resources are both important in sustaining them through the beginning year(s) of their teaching careers. The study emphasises the critical roles played by family and friends and the importance of relationships in the resilience process. Implications for future research and teacher education are discussed.
133 citations
Cites background from "Social Ecologies and Their Contribu..."
...Ungar (2012) has adopted an ecological position which “suggests complexity in reciprocal person-environment interactions” (p. 14) and as individual teachers face challenges in their environment, they actively use various strategies to overcome these (Patterson, Collins & Abbott, 2004)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors use household interviews and surveys to build and test a substantive model that illustrates how social cohesion influences the decision to prepare for wildfire and demonstrate that social cohesion, particularly community characteristics like "sense of community" and "collective problem solving", are community-based resources that support both the adoption of mechanical preparations, and the development of cognitive abilities and capacities that reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience to wildfire.
Abstract: The consequences of wildfires are felt in susceptible communities around the globe on an annual basis. Climate change predictions in places like the south-east of Australia and western United States suggest that wildfires may become more frequent and more intense with global climate change. Compounding this issue is progressive urban development at the peri-urban fringe (wildland–urban interface), where continued infrastructure development and demographic changes are likely to expose more people and property to this potentially disastrous natural hazard. Preparing well in advance of the wildfire season is seen as a fundamental behaviour that can both reduce community wildfire vulnerability and increase hazard resilience – it is an important element of adaptive capacity that allows people to coexist with the hazardous environment in which they live. We use household interviews and surveys to build and test a substantive model that illustrates how social cohesion influences the decision to prepare for wildfire. We demonstrate that social cohesion, particularly community characteristics like ‘sense of community’ and ‘collective problem solving’, are community-based resources that support both the adoption of mechanical preparations, and the development of cognitive abilities and capacities that reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience to wildfire. We use the results of this work to highlight opportunities to transfer techniques and approaches from natural hazards research to climate change adaptation research to explore how the impacts attributed to the social components of social–ecological systems can be mitigated more effectively.
125 citations
References
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TL;DR: An integrative theoretical framework to explain and to predict psychological changes achieved by different modes of treatment is presented and findings are reported from microanalyses of enactive, vicarious, and emotive mode of treatment that support the hypothesized relationship between perceived self-efficacy and behavioral changes.
Abstract: The present article presents an integrative theoretical framework to explain and to predict psychological changes achieved by different modes of treatment. This theory states that psychological procedures, whatever their form, alter the level and strength of self-efficacy. It is hypothesized that expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. Persistence in activities that are subjectively threatening but in fact relatively safe produces, through experiences of mastery, further enhancement of self-efficacy and corresponding reductions in defensive behavior. In the proposed model, expectations of personal efficacy are derived from four principal sources of information: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states. The more dependable the experiential sources, the greater are the changes in perceived selfefficacy. A number of factors are identified as influencing the cognitive processing of efficacy information arising from enactive, vicarious, exhortative, and emotive sources. The differential power of diverse therapeutic procedures is analyzed in terms of the postulated cognitive mechanism of operation. Findings are reported from microanalyses of enactive, vicarious, and emotive modes of treatment that support the hypothesized relationship between perceived self-efficacy and behavioral changes. Possible directions for further research are discussed.
38,007 citations
"Social Ecologies and Their Contribu..." refers background in this paper
...Selfefficacy (Bandura, 1977), sense of coherence (Antonovsky, 1987), self-esteem (Brown & Lohr, 1987), prosociality (Dovidio, Piliavin, Schroeder, & Penner, 2006), and other individual qualities associated with resilience have been hypothesized as more or less amenable to protection from the…...
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...Efficacy is the result of opportunities to make a meaningful contribution to others or find other ways to control one’s world (Bandura 1977; Emond, 2010)....
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...Selfefficacy (Bandura, 1977), sense of coherence (Antonovsky, 1987), self-esteem (Brown & Lohr, 1987), prosociality (Dovidio, Piliavin, Schroeder, & Penner, 2006), and other individual qualities associated with resilience have been hypothesized as more or less amenable to protection from the negative influence of environmental stressors and the health-promoting function of supports (Murphy & Moriarty, 1976; Werner & Smith, 1982)....
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Book•
01 Jan 1978
TL;DR: In this paper, Cole and Scribner discuss the role of play in children's development and play as a tool and symbol in the development of perception and attention in a prehistory of written language.
Abstract: Introduction Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner Biographical Note on L S Vygotsky Basic Theory and Data 1 Tool and Symbol in Child Development 2 The Development of Perception and Attention 3 Mastery of Memory and Thinking 4 Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions 5 Problems of Method Educational Implications 6 Interaction between Learning and Development 7 The Role of Play in Development 8 The Prehistory of Written Language Afterword Vera John-Steiner and Ellen Souberman Notes Vygotsky's Works Index
32,902 citations
01 Jan 1978
16,723 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1972
TL;DR: Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead as discussed by the authors, and his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.
Abstract: Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. "This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life...Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory...He ...examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."--D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books "[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive...This is a book we should all read and ponder."--Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of Naven and Mind and Nature.
7,679 citations
"Social Ecologies and Their Contribu..." refers background in this paper
...Human cybernetics (Bateson, 1972) and even theories of human ecology (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) reified an understanding of the environment that was progressive a half century ago....
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...In the language of human cybernetics (Bateson, 1972; von Bertalanffy, 1968), individuals return to a state of homeostasis (recovery to a previous level of functioning) or, in rare cases, experience change and growth (morphogenesis) following exposure to a toxic environment....
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TL;DR: A critical appraisal of resilience, a construct connoting the maintenance of positive adaptation by individuals despite experiences of significant adversity, concludes that work on resilience possesses substantial potential for augmenting the understanding of processes affecting at-risk individuals.
Abstract: This paper presents a critical appraisal of resilience, a construct connoting the maintenance of positive adaptation by individuals despite experiences of significant adversity. As empirical research on resilience has burgeoned in recent years, criticisms have been levied at work in this area. These critiques have generally focused on ambiguities in definitions and central terminology; heterogeneity in risks experienced and competence achieved by individuals viewed as resilient; instability of the phenomenon of resilience; and concerns regarding the usefulness of resilience as a theoretical construct. We address each identified criticism in turn, proposing solutions for those we view as legitimate and clarifying misunderstandings surrounding those we believe to be less valid. We conclude that work on resilience possesses substantial potential for augmenting the understanding of processes affecting at-risk individuals. Realization of the potential embodied by this construct, however, will remain constrained without continued scientific attention to some of the serious conceptual and methodological pitfalls that have been noted by skeptics and proponents alike.
7,392 citations
"Social Ecologies and Their Contribu..." refers background in this paper
...Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker (2000) suggest that successful adaptation is properly operationalized when it reflects high fidelity to the way good development is theorized for a particular sample of at-risk individuals in a particular context....
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...They simply emphasize different aspects of the processes associated with resilience, whether those processes are compensatory, protective, or promotive (Luthar et al., 2000)....
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