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The Risky Business of Translating Resiliency Research into Advocacy Practice

Sheila Martineau PhD, Social & Educational Studies

The following article introduces some of the key issues raised in my dissertation, titled Rewriting Resilience: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Childhood Resilience and the Politics of Teaching Resilience to "Kids at Risk" in Inner-City Schools (UBC, 1999).¹

Childhood resilience has emerged over the past decade as a popular and hopeful theme among child and youth advocates in British Columbia. The promise of teaching resilience to children at risk has enormous appeal for educators, psychologists, social workers, and other advocacy professionals. Though widely conceptualized today as the ability to bounce back from adversity, resilience was initially interpreted by child psychologists as invulnerability to trauma; it continues to represent such historical ideologies as heroism, stoicism, and rugged individualism. Against this backdrop of hope and heroism, my analysis of childhood resilience and teaching resilience identifies several problems in resiliency research and rhetoric and their influence on advocacy policy and practice today. It also provides a more complex view of resilience that suggests redirections for both research and practice.

Resiliency Research and Rhetoric

Research on childhood resilience is rooted in post-1040s studies of children"s coping and competence, when child psychologists first began to observe the anomaly of children who appeared invulnerable to trauma. These "invulnerable children" experienced severely traumatic events but then exhibited successful social skills and school performance. Their behaviour became labelled as "resilient", and their resilience was measured mainly by personality tests and achievement scores in a biased and circular process that ultimately imposed the norms and values of the researchers on their own perceptions of resilience. Thus, resilience came to be defined by what child psychologists measured by what was valued, observed, and measurable. There has since been a proliferation of these psychometric studies of childhood resilience conducted in the "psy-sciences" (e.g., in developmental and educational psychology and in such sub-disciplines as adolescent psychopathology).

• Slippery Slopes

Integral to the early studies that purported to measure children's resilience was severe trauma, which occurs across all classes and cultures in contexts such as child abuse and neglect, parents' mental illness, and political violence. But some dangerous slippages have occurred in resiliency research over the interim decades. In one slip, the meaning of resilience shifted from the anomaly of seeming to be invulnerable in the context of trauma to the social norm of being successful in the dominant society. In another slip, the focus of resiliency research shifted from small traumatized groups to larger at-risk and disadvantaged populations, a move that conflated risk with trauma. In still another slip, symptoms of severe trauma such as denial and dissociation (children's coping mechanisms) could too easily be misinterpreted as a child's invulnerability to trauma, which would then pass for resilience.

These slides from anomaly to social norm, from traumatized to disadvantaged groups, from symptoms of severe trauma to assumptions of invulnerability have occurred along a slippery slope that trivializes trauma, pathologizes vulnerability, champions individualism, targets disadvantaged groups, and even evokes cultural imperialism. Though my claims are harsh, I do not pose such slippages as intentional. Nonetheless, they tend to manifest in [1] teaching disadvantaged young people to conform to the social norms of the dominant society by [2] rationalizing social and educational programs that help at-risk young people to "overcome obstacles" or to "bounce back from adversity" but [3] that fail to overtly value children's cultural diversity and actively challenge the systemic inequalities that circumscribe their lives.

• Ideological Codes

In its move from scientific study to everyday speech, resilience has become a new codeword that reinforces dominant norms and further marginalizes disadvantaged groups. Consequently, "childhood resilience" is now a euphemism for academic achievement and "teaching resilience" is a euphemism for social conformity. These rhetorical codes unwittingly discriminate against class and cultural diversity; taken together, they represent mainstream standards of children staying in school, getting good grades, having non-disruptive behaviour, and being (or becoming) members of the dominant society. In other words, received notions of childhood resilience typically reflect current mainstream norms, while mainstream notions about teaching resilience tend to target minority populations as culturally deficient.

Three Resiliency Discourses

I have briefly introduced several problems with popular perceptions of resilience. Conflicting meanings of childhood resilience and their troubling implications for teaching resilience are explicated in the following overview of three different resiliency discourses that I have identified and critically analyzed. First is the well-documented and dominant discourse derived from scientific studies of resilient-identified children and youth, which constitutes an expert discourse. Second is a discourse derived from the published life stories of mature adults identified as resilient by psychotherapists through a rigorous selection process, which constitutes an experiential discourse that is unfortunately devalued by, and thus subordinated to, the expert discourse.

Third is a "discourse in the making" within BC's child and youth advocacy community, which constitutes an advocacy discourse. My awareness of this developing discourse on resilience evolved during the mid-1990s while attending several advocacy conferences as both a volunteer and a researcher. I subsequently interviewed 23 advocates (see Table 2) and found that they were variously synthesizing aspects of both the expert and the experiential discourses with the diversity of their own personal and professional experiences.

• The Expert Discourse

Central to the dominance of the expert discourse is its quantification of resiliency traits, factors, and social conditions. Its unquestioned acceptance by researchers and practitioners is troubling, however, given the contradictory claim that [1] resilience is a set of static traits ascribed to innate temperament and [2] resilience can be taught to, or reproduced in, others by enhancing their social environments. Such incoherence illustrates another slip in the statistical studies, one that disregards the continuous interplay between nature and nurture, between temperament and environment.

Informing the ambiguous claim that resilience is innate but teachable is a linear model of causation and prediction that reduces human experience to a set of inputs and outputs (see Table 1 below, as gleaned from the expert discourse). This model cannot withstand critical scrutiny in light of the life histories of resilient-identified adults who suffered severe trauma in their childhoods (the experiential discourse). Nor does it begin to capture the complex interrelationships among childrens individual temperaments and their cultural, familial, personal, and social responses to the shifting environmental conditions and circumstances of their lives. Nonetheless, Table 1 thematically illustrates the efficient conclusions of the statistical studies and their effective translation into advocacy practice:

Table 1: Linear Model of "Resiliency" Traits and Factors

The above Table positions resiliency traits as a bridge between [1] the dominant inputs of providing children at risk with supportive relationships (parents, teachers, mentors) in protective environments (families, schools, communities) and [2] the dominant outputs of resilient children both conforming to social norms and attaining academic achievement. Such a formula assumes that the "at-risk child" is not resilient and the "resilient child" is not at risk; thus, as the arrows in Table 1 suggest, the at-risk child becomes the resilient child. There is increasing critical research to suggest, however, that many studies may be measuring children pre-identified as resilient (whether or not they are at risk) because they conform to social norms and expectations. Importantly, traumatized children can be dangerously adaptive in the need to please adults and they can be adaptively distant in ways that do not typically meet with adult approval.

• The Experiential Discourse

The many resilient-identified adults whose published narratives contribute to an experiential discourse come from all walks of life and from all classes and cultures. Each of them experienced severe trauma in childhood and stated that as children they did not fit the picture of resilience painted by the expert discourse. Similarly, I found no specific links or intersections that suggested the resilient-identified children in the statistical studies would necessarily grow up to resemble these adults.

Common themes woven through the life cycles and life stories of resilient-identified adults include motivation, marginalization, imagination, and long-term mediation. These adults had been self-motivated children who sought out supportive relationships as and when needed. They were not invulnerable to trauma and, contrary to having a stable sense of belonging in their families and communities, the source of their childhood trauma often caused them to feel marginalized in such settings. But permeating their self-motivation and marginalization were active imaginations that invariably guided them toward the relationships they needed while also creating whimsical worlds into which they could escape.

These adults described a "lifelong process of mediation", an ongoing willingness to acknowledge their anguish in "manageable doses". Intrinsic to this process is the determination to learn from their experiences and to slowly integrate their trauma into a transforming sense of self. They do not bounce back from childhood adversity in the short term; rather, they move through and beyond trauma over the long term. Their resilience was, and is, intricately intertwined with risk and trauma and they experience it as provisional and unpredictable. As traumatized children or youth they did not typically comply with the expectations of adults in positions of authority concerning, say, conformity and achievement. Many left grade school early, indulged in disruptive behaviours, ran away from home, engaged in delinquent activities, and pursued other endeavours: they worked, travelled, studied, searched, started over, helped others.

Though it could be argued that the characteristics just described are similar to the tabulated resiliency traits of sociability, creativity, autonomy, and purposefulness, there are significant differences between how resilience might manifest in traumatized children and how it is mis/interpreted by professional adults. Children may exhibit success or creativity, for example, in myriad ways inseparable from their diverse social and cultural worlds. Thus, the experiential discourse challenges the primacy of psychometric studies that portray resilient children as those who fit the status quo. These opposing views reappear, however, in the advocacy discourse.

• The Advocacy Discourse

Identifying a fledgling advocacy discourse, I reviewed a range of printed materials and conducted individual interviews with 23 advocates-educators, psychologists, and social service workers who were interested in children's risk and resilience and occupied positions to influence policy and practice in British Columbia (see Table 2):

Table 2: Location of Advocates Interviewed by Profession & Gender

In their daily work and in the public eye, these child and youth advocates must negotiate the competing demands of political constraint, progressive practice, economic expediency, and program effectiveness, to name a few. They share a cohesive dedication to children's well-being but, with popular resilience still in its "infancy", they lack consensus on the meaning of resilience. This lack is partly due to differing degrees of knowledge and exposure to resilience. Despite disparities within and across the interviews given that ambiguities infuse our experiences and perceptions - two common threads throughout were the fear of harming just one child and the hope of helping just one child.

The advocates had been exposed to the expert discourse through books, websites, newsletters, conferences, or word of mouth; collectively, they could easily recite resiliency traits, factors, and conditions as listed in the statistical studies. Some advocates touched on a less talked-about approach to risk and resilience, however, that did not promote teaching resilience per se but, rather, accentuated strategies for children to learn, build, and experience. Related to this view, the perspectives of advocates who reported risk and distress in their own childhoods were more likely to reflect the experiential discourse and to associate resilience with the presence of trauma, not with the absence of trauma.

Embedded in the advocacy discourse - and evidenced by discrepancies between the expert and experiential discourses - is the need to step away from quick-fix prescriptions as ultimate solutions to social problems, solutions that can generate new or unforeseen problems.

Redirections for Research and Practice

I have resisted conclusively defining resilience, instead identifying a few salient features that contest popular perceptions: without severe trauma at its core, resilience as a psychological concept loses its meaning; resilience is mediated over the long term in multiple ways that cannot be observed or measured in the short term; traumatized children who are perceived as vulnerable or invulnerable (along a continuum) may or may not be more or less adaptive or maladaptive later in life.

Underlying these features is a paradox: Does a child's so-called resilience signal the absence of trauma in the face of traumatic events (a contradictory claim) or does the absence of trauma signal that the child was shielded from trauma? My response poses another question: Do we celebrate children and youth who seem unaffected by prolonged exposure to abuse and violence or do we acknowledge the trauma in their ability or inability to grieve for, or to process, what has happened to them? Such questions implicitly reframe resilience and act to displace the dangerous slippages described earlier.

The risky business of translating resiliency research into advocacy practice involves complicated issues barely touched upon here. My analysis does yield some broad suggestions, though, that may contribute to redirections in research and practice: We can use interactive models to guide us in thinking critically about social problems in pluralistic societies. We cannot eliminate risk and trauma but we can move beyond the limits of targeting disadvantaged populations. We can support culturally diverse community environments that have intrinsic value for the well-being of their children and youth. And we can collaborate across cultures and disciplines in assessing expert and experiential knowledge and in actively challenging systemic discrimination.

It is crucial to identify resiliency rhetoric as a panacean promise, one that masks socioeconomic problems not being addressed - and perhaps being perpetuated - by ostensibly teaching "kids at risk" to be resilient.

¹ An earlier version of this article was printed in the Newsletter of the Society for Children and Youth of BC; see FOCUS on Children and Youth 5.1 (Spring 2000): 9-12. The author, Sheila Martineau, can be contacted at smartin@interchange.ubc.ca.