Mental Health & Human Resilience

This paper explores the life journey of adolescents to comprehend the construct of resilience. The phenomenon of resilience was explored from three adolescents residing at a socially and economically deprived neighborhood of Janta Nagar, in Mumbai, India. A phenomenological approach was adopted to understand resilience as a subjective experience shaped by a shared identity of deprived adolescents. Purposive and snowball sampling was used to select participants. Focused group discussions were held to investigate the risk conditions among adolescents of the community. In-depth interviews were conducted to collect data that elicited information on the subjective positive outcomes. The narratives of one female and two males aged 12, 13 and 14 years were analyzed thematically. Mother’s illness, physical injury and life-threat (kidnap) were the crucial risk conditions in the lives of these adolescents, respectively. Being responsible, courageous and having aspirations were found as predominant resilient processes among the three adolescents, respectively. Individual traits of optimism, assertiveness, self-confidence, empathy and gratitude, community elements like family, bystander, and neighbors were found as crucial elements for promoting resilience factors. As a phenomenon, resilience was argued to be culturally and contextually embedded.

Recent Publications:

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2. Reis S M, Colbert R D and Hébert T P (2004) Understanding resilience in diverse, talented students in an urban high school. Roeper Review 27(2):110-120.

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4. Ungar M (2011) The social ecology of resilience: addressing contextual and cultural ambiguity of a nascent construct. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81(1):1–17.

5. Ungar M and Liebenberg L (2011) Assessing resilience across cultures using mixed methods: construction of the child and youth resilience measure. Journal of Mixed Methods 5(2):126-149.