5 - Vulnerability, Risk and Resistance Flashcards
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory
Microsystem - immediate environment Mesosystem - connections Exosystem - indirect environment Macrosystem - social and cultural values Chronosystem - changes over time
Multifinality
One cause resulting in multiple outcomes
Resilience (Masten)
Good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development
Comes from a development biopsychosocial lens
Outcome-focused
Resilience (Ungar)
Resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain well-being and their capacity individually & collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided and experienced in culturally meaningful ways
Focuses simultaneously on environment and individual
Resilience is the quality of the interaction between the child and environment, and the competence of each
Process-focused
Four Waves of Resilience Science (Masten, 2007)
First Wave - measuring and describing the phenomena
Second Wave - uncovering the processes
Third Wave - testing preventive interventions
Fourth Wave - multilevel interactions
Differential impact
Individuals respond to supportive relationships in their own unique way
Not one-size-fits-all
Think about Multifinality
Contextual and Cultural Moderation
The way that cultural universals are being applied will differ across different cultural groups
Serious Threat
Risk factor: any measurable characteristic of an individual, family or social context associated with an increased likelihood of some “undesired” developmental outcome
Cumulative risk: the number (or persistence) of risk factors to which an individual is exposed
Resilience Research: The First Wave
Identifying characteristics of children, their families or their social environments that are associated with resilience.
Centrality of relationships
Werner & Smith studies
Resilience Research: The First Wave - INDIVIDUAL
Good intellectual functioning
Appealing, sociable, easy-going dispositions
Self-efficacy, self-confidence and high self-esteem
Talents
Faith
Resilience Research: The First Wave - FAMILY
Close relationships with caring parent figures
Authoritative parents
Socioeconomic advantages
Connections to extended supportive family networks
Resilience Research: The First Wave - EXTRAFAMILIAL
Bonds to prosocial youth outside the family
Connections to prosocial organizations
School climate/culture
Seven Aspects of Youth Resilience
Access to material resources Relationships Identity Power & Control Cultural adherence Social justice Cohesion
Assets
Compensatory or promotive factors
Characteristics associated with “good” developmental outcomes for many youth
Protective factors
associated with “good” developmental outcomes in the context of threats to development
Resilience Research: The Second Wave
Thinking about HOW
Clarifying the developmental processes that may account for the correlates of resilience
Protective processes - operate through ways in which people deal with life changes and with stress and adversity - role of social relationships
Resilience Research: The Second Wave - Fundamental Human Adaptational Systems
“Ordinary Magic” (Masten, 2001)
These processes were not special to youth - these are good for everyone whether or not you have experienced risk.
Intellectual functioning
Behavioural self-regulation
Caregiver-child relationships
Resilience Research: The Third Wave
The emergence of the field of PREVENTION SCIENCE
Interventions to promote positive development in children and youth building on correlates and research
Systematic study of interventions
Intervention
Organized attempt to improve individual functioning or change developmental trajectories
Logic Model
The full theoretical model specifying the processes by which a particular intervention is thought to achieve its goals
- Developmental theory
- Causal & Malleable risk factors
- Theory of the intervention
- Mediators - risk factors, protective factors, assets
- Moderators - factors that may alter intervention impact or developmental processes
Intervention and Change Goals
Harm reduction
Health promotion
Primary Prevention
Stop it from happening at all
Secondary Prevention
An incident has occurred, but trying to mitigate any long term consequences
Tertiary Prevention
Multiple incidents have occurred and now they are trying to mitigate acute, long-term, immediate consequences
Also referred to as INTERVENTION interchangeably
Intervention Spectrum
WHO we are targetting
Universal - society as a whole - requires quite general langage (approx. 80%)
Selective - people showing some risk factors (5-20%
Indicated - acutely affected population (less than 5%)
Resilience Research: The Fourth Wave
Multilevel analysis
Implementation science
Benefit-cost analysis
Multilevel analyses
Considering biology-environment interactions
Implementation Science
Started in 2004
Tends to be local and small
How to get innovation into practice
Facilitating the use of best practices in local communities
Benefit-cost analysis
Documenting the benefits and costs of different preventive interventions
Using incentive information to shape public policy
Diathesis-Stress/Dual-Risk Model
Outdated
Oversimplified understanding of vulnerability and positive/negative outcomes
Better to think about Differential susceptibility hypothesis or Biological sensitivity to context
Differential Susceptibility Hypothesis (Belsky & Pluess, 2009)
Some individuals are more vulnerable to the negative effects of adversity and are also more likely to benefit from supportive/enriching experiences
Biological Sensitivity to Context (Boyce & Ellis, 2005)
Stress reactivity is not a unitary process
Effects of high reactivity phenotypes can exert risk-increasing or risk-protective effects depending on environmental context
