The Pathways to Resilience Research Project (PTR) is a series of studies that began in Canada in 2007 with funding from the National Crime Prevention Centre, and will continue until 2014 with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the International Development Research Centre and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The project integrates both quantitative and qualitative research methods to examine service use patterns, personal and ecological risk factors, and aspects of resilience of youth across different cultures, contexts, and with complex service histories. The PTR now includes partners in at least five countries: Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Colombia, and China.

We partner with communities and service providers in each of the above countries to help them identify:

• The culturally specific aspects of resilience (strengths and capacities) young people in their community use to cope with problems.

• The psychological, social, and environmental risks that young people face.

• Young people’s service use patterns, i.e. their use of mandated services like Child Welfare, Corrections, Mental Health, Addictions, and Special Educational Services at school, their use of informal supports from their family and communities, and their use of informal services provided by local not-for-profit community organizations.

Goals

Our goal is to identify pathways through mandated and informal services as well as informal family and community supports that are most predictive of positive psychosocial outcomes for youth who face significant levels of adversity. Furthermore, we hope to give communities, their schools, governments, and service providers a very detailed understanding of young people’s ways of coping with adversity and the risks they face. We would also like to help service providers from many different organizations find ways to coordinate services, create new services young people say they need, and find ways young people can get connected to community and family supports that can help them “grow up well” despite the challenges they face.

While every community we work with we work with differently, the PTR Project tries to provide communities with what they need to make informed social policy decisions and design programming for youth-at-risk. We currently have partnerships with service providers like schools, mental health centres, child welfare agencies and correctional institutions in eastern Canada and each of our partner countries. We also count among our collaborators dozens of non-governmental community organizations.


Multiple Mixed Methods

With the funding we hold nationally and internationally across the network, each community is able to hire local researchers who we can help train to do several things:
 

1. Adapt the research methods to ensure they are relevant and culturally appropriate.

2. Administer a questionnaire, the Pathways to Resilience Measure (PRYM) to youth aged 13-19 that explores their resilience, the risks they face, and their service and support use patterns (a version of the PRYM has also been developed for use with children as young as 9, and a caregiver/person most knowledge version for adult caregivers). The questionnaire takes approximately 50 minutes to complete. Individual youth is provided a small honorarium to participate and to compensate them for their expenses. Each community where the research is done, we seek the following groups of young people:

   • Youth who are already using at least one mandated service. We ask for referrals from child protection workers, mental health counsellors, corrections officers, and school guidance counsellors, as well as community groups working with youth. These are the Service User population for the study. In most cases, we seek youth who are using more than one service or community support to ensure these really are children who are at-risk and in need of intervention.

   • Youth who are known to face many risks but who are still doing well (resilient). We ask communities to identify these youth themselves. Usually these young people are involved in arts or sports activities, attending school regularly, or learning traditional skills. Any young person community advisors say faces significant risk but is still doing well is ideal for the study.

   • Youth who are living in the community. We select youth not for any special reason other than they live in the same community as the youth from the previous two samples. We have found it easiest to find these young people through their schools or by putting up posters in their community, or simply by going door-to-door and locating young people who are willing to be interviewed.

3. When youth who are between the ages of 13 and 15 (from the total sample of 13-19-year-olds) we follow their progress for up to three years, seeing if their pattern of service use, the risks they face, and their resilience, changes. We interview them once a year. This longitudinal data helps us understand how service use patterns change as young people make the transition from child to young adult.

4. We also conduct very detailed one-on-one interviews that let hundreds of young people tell us, in their own words, about their coping strategies and what’s helpful and unhelpful. These interviews are gathered together.

5. When possible, and with the informed consent of participants, we review young people’s multiple service files in order to better understand the pathways they’ve traveled between services, and the full scope of all the services they have received from each provider. Using a grounded theory approach to data analysis, we look for common themes throughout the qualitative data.

6. Local researchers then hold focus groups with young people, their caregivers, and service providers to help analyse the data and make recommendations for new policies and interventions.

7. Finally, we support the development of pilot initiatives that reach out to vulnerable youth, help coordinate services better, or connect youth to informal supports. Anything that fosters resilience, and is relevant to a local community, can be supported by the PTR Project. Our role as researchers is to help each community establish an intervention and then use our multiple research methods to set up program and evaluate it to see if it is helping.

The design of the research allows us each community to own the data it generates. The PTR Project provides support with data collection, analysis, and dissemination of results. The information brought back to the community can be made available in any way that it will be useful. The only thing we ask the community is to share with the Resilience Research Centre data from the young people in a way that ensures they, and the community, remain anonymous. By comparing anonymitized data from all the different research sites around the world, we are beginning to learn about patterns of resilience, risk and service use across many different youth populations in many different cultures.

For more information on the study, or to adapt the study to your community (or country), please contact us at rrc@dal.ca. We would be happy to share our qualitative and quantitative research tools.