The Negotiating Resilience Project is a three-year, multi-site, visual methods study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and administered through the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University. The purpose of the project is to understand the interactive processes associated with positive development among children and youth who are in transition between two (and possibly more) culturally distinct worlds. We are interested in learning both what resilience means, as well as the pathways to resilience, from the perspectives of youth who are "out-of-place" in some way and coping well with their displacement (for example, a youth with a physical disability being educated among able-bodied youth; an Aboriginal youth living off-reserve in an urban environment; a multi-ethnic youth whose identity must be negotiated in an ethnically diverse community; and a child refugee displaced from her/his home community).

The Negotiating Resilience project is using an innovative combination of visual methods, observation, qualitative interviews and reciprocity between researchers and youth to deepen our understandings of resilience from children and youth's own cultural and contextual viewpoints. Currently, our partner research sites include Halifax, Nova Scotia; Montreal, Quebec; Vancouver, British Colombia; and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada; as well as Jinan, China; Guwahati, India; Chiang Mai, Thailand; and the Vaal Triangle, South Africa. Additional research sites are currently being developed in Brazil and throughout Atlantic Canada with supplementary funding.

It is hoped that young people from other countries will participate in the research in the future and we welcome partnerships with researchers and students interested in replicating the study with youth in their community.


Goals

Specifically, the Negotiating Resilience project aims to:
 

• Document a plurality of protective processes in the lives of youth exposed to significant amounts of risk as defined by different communities, from the perspectives of youth themselves;

• Further our understanding of children as social actors, interacting with their environments in ways that shape, and are shaped by, their social ecologies;

• Explore gender-based differences in youths' interactions with their social ecologies and the protective processes they engage in; and

• Develop a set of qualitative protocols for gathering visual methods data useful to the study of resilience across diverse cultures and contexts.

 
Participants

Sixteen 13 to 16 year old youth, which will include one boy and one girl from eight research sites where youth are facing more than one 'tension' or 'adversity' in their communities, will participate in the study. We have chosen to document the lives of 13 to 16-year-olds specifically because of the developmental crossroads they have reached in their interactions with their wider communities. The youth participants will be those who are seen by community advisors as "growing up well under adversity."


Related Literature

For a list of related literature, please click here.