The overall purpose of the present study is to contribute to a better understanding of the experiences of young homeless women residing at Covenant House New York, a youth shelter that provides crisis and long-term residential programs to young adults ages 18 – 21. The main objective was to identify past life events and their contributions to the development of positive traits and psychopathology among three groups. The participants were 162 homeless young women, including childfree women, young mothers enrolled at a transitional living Rights of Passage program (12-18 months), and young mothers in crisis enrolled in a 30-day Mother and Child Crisis program. Past life experiences were identified via the Effort to Outcome (ETO) online software database maintained by Covenant House New York. Rates of psychopathology were measured using the IIP (interpersonal problems), PHQ-9 (depression), GAD-7 (anxiety), PSS (parental stress) while rates of positive traits were measured using the SCS (self-compassion), SCBCS (compassion toward others), and PGIS (motivation to change). The results indicated that all participants, regardless of group affiliation, had similar life experiences, though childfree women were more likely to have a history of abandonment, physical abuse, and previous incidents of homelessness. Additionally, presence of abuse history was positively associated with development of psychopathology. As expected, history of sexual abuse was negatively associated with self-compassion, but it was positively associated with compassion toward others. Mothers at the Mother and Child Crisis program had greater rates of self-compassion than mothers at the Rights of Passage program, and childfree women were more likely than the mothers to be compassionate toward others. Mothers at the Mother and Child Crisis program were also more likely to be compassionate toward others than mothers at the Rights of Passage program. Childfree women, however, were more likely to be depressed than mothers at the Mother and Child Crisis program.

In three parts, this dissertation seeks to clarify constructs used in contemporary and emerging models of child resilience, examine the predictive capacity of these models, and delineate key steps towards improving and refining models useful to mental health and psychosocial support program and policy initiatives in humanitarian settings. Data collected for this research was part of an inter-agency evaluation of Child Friendly Spaces in Nepal following the 2015 earthquake. Findings from these studies call for future research directed towards the development of more rigorous and equitable indicators used to evaluate mental health and psychosocial support programs that allow for a longer tracing of healthy developmental trajectories for children affected by situations of extreme adversity.

Cognitive processes have been shown to be severely affected by exposure to combat and war. While the negative impact of war on cognitive performance is apparent through numerous soldier narratives, the scientific investigation of this phenomenon is limited. Furthermore, the moderating influence of an individual’s resilience and grit on cognitive functions following combat environments is unknown. Understanding this interaction is essential in further understanding individual cognitive performance. Because the psychological wounds inflicted by combat situations affect individuals’ mental health, studying how such environments influence cognitive processes and performance can improve the training of our soldiers. This dissertation focuses on assessing how combat-like environments influence an individual’s ability to effectively and efficiently reason, and further examines whether an individual’s grit and resilience affect deductive and inductive reasoning in stressful environments. Participants were recruited from a private US military academy. The study used a pretest-posttest mixed design to investigate possible cognitive decrements in individuals’ ability to reason following exposure to war-like environments simulated by immersive and non-immersive technologies. Dependent measures included both inductive and deductive reasoning (as measured by The Letter Sets Test and Overton’s (1990) version of the Wason Selection Task, respectively) by placing participants into the immersive or non-immersive conditions. Self-reported resilience and grit were tested for interaction effects to examine how an individual’s resilience and grit influences an individual’s ability to reason in war-like environments. These findings might give a richer understanding of the ways in which cognitive mechanisms are affected by stressful environments like combat.

Increases in the number of enlisted veterans transitioning from active duty to the civilian world have drawn attention to a need for research in terms of unemployment to examine how separated service members experience transition from their perspective. Fifteen separated enlisted veterans from four of the five military branches were selected and interviewed in this study. The focus was to understand better the complexities of reintegrating into the civilian workforce, as experienced by veterans from the enlisted military population. By using qualitative methodologies including exploratory interviews and a focus group, the findings revealed four major themes on how service members described their transition experience: (a) perception that military leadership does not provide adequate support when transitioning and the need to become more self-directed in one’s own learning; (b) belief that the military TAP class is helpful but needs major changes to truly be effective; (c) description of a battle buddy or a family member as a positive influence in helping with the transition process; and (d) experiencing significant challenges with civilian employers when transitioning out of the military. An analysis of the findings led the researcher to conclude that transitioning veterans must become self-directed in their learning in order to transition successfully. Moreover, because they are at varying levels of being self-directed when they transition, additional guidance is needed from military leadership, family, and other veterans for the purpose of their development. The analysis also yielded a principal recommendation for military leadership to advocate for quality training programs that are specified from the separated enlisted population for what resources they need to assist with transition to the civilian sector. Additional recommendations were presented to transitioning service members on the importance of managing their own success and believing in their abilities to be resilient, valuable members of the civilian community.

For failure experiences to be productive for future performance or learning, students must be both willing to persist in the face of failure, and effective in gleaning information from their errors. While there have been extensive advances in understanding the motivational dispositions that drive resilience and persistence in the face of failure, less has been done to investigate what strategies and learning behaviors students can undertake to make those failure experiences productive. This dissertation investigates what kinds of behaviors expert learners (in the form of graduate students) employ when encountering failure that predict future performance (Study 1), and whether such effective behaviors can be provoked in less sophisticated learners (in the form of high school students) that would subsequently lead to deeper learning (Study 2). Study 1 showed that experiencing and responding to failures in an educational electrical circuit puzzle game prior to formal instruction led to deeper learning, and that one particular strategy, “information-seeking and fixing”, was predictive of higher performance. This strategy was decomposed into three metacognitive components: error specification, where the subject made the realization that a knowledge gap or misunderstanding led to the failure; knowledge gap resolution, where the subject sought information to resolve the knowledge gap; and application, where subjects took their newly acquired information to fix their prior error. In Study 2, two types of prompts were added to the educational game: one that provoked students through these metacognitive steps of error specification, information seeking, and fixing, labelled the “Metacognitive Failure Response” (MFR) condition; and a second prompt that provoked students to make a global judgment of knowing, labelled the “Global Awareness” (GA) condition. The results indicated that although there were no significant condition differences between the three groups (MFR, GA, and control condition where participants received no prompt at all), more time spent on the MFR prompt predicted deeper and more robust learning. In contrast, more time spent on the “Global Awareness” prompt did not predict deeper learning, suggesting that individual factors (such as conscientiousness) did not alone account for the benefits of time spent on the MFR prompt on learning. These results suggest that while MFR participants who carefully attended to the metacognitive prompts to specify the source of their errors and seek information experienced learning benefits, not all MFR participants sufficiently attended to the prompts enough to experience learning gains. Altogether, this body of research suggests that using this “error specification, info-seeking, fixing” strategy can be effective for making failure productive, but other instructional techniques beyond system-delivered prompts must be employed for full adoption of this metacognitive response to failure. Implications for teaching students to respond effectively to failure, for games in the classroom, and for design and engineering processes are discussed.

A research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social and Psychological Research by Coursework and Research Report in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, March 2017 / Working memory (WM) is an executive function that may promote resilience by enabling individuals to generate novel solutions in adverse situations. Research regarding the relationship between these constructs is limited. It is particularly unclear whether, and how, WM may promote resilience in the South African context. This study thus used a mixed method concurrent triangulation design to quantitatively investigate whether WM is related to resilience; and to qualitatively investigate how WM processes feature in participants’ experiences of resilience, and how this is influenced by socio-cultural factors. Thirty-eight young Black South African adults from disadvantaged backgrounds (whose WM had been assessed in a pre-existing study) completed a demographic questionnaire and the Resilience Research Centre-Adult Resilience Measure in person or online. For the qualitative phase, 14 of these participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Quantitative findings were equivocal, but primarily non-significant. Qualitative findings indicated that WM processes featured in participants’ accounts of resilience-promoting resources, but that this was shaped by socio-cultural resources accessible to participants. Working memory also featured as one amongst many of the resilience-promoting resources accessible to participants. The disparity between the quantitative and qualitative findings may be due to the individualistic nature of the quantitative WM measure used. Findings are interpreted in relation to existing literature regarding cognitive functioning and resilience. Implications for understanding and promoting the resilience of Black South African young adults are discussed. / XL2018

This is a qualitative research project that seeks to understand the meanings that Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselors (CADC's) have ascribed to their life experiences in relation to their choices about higher education. The participants are four Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselors in Oregon who have less than bachelor degrees. The research is based on a case study method of inquiry in which the participants discuss their life experiences and their thoughts about their educations during in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The findings are grouped into two themes that emerged from the data: The themes are: 1) resiliency and 2) personal transformation. In keeping with the literature, this study indicates that people can and do develop resiliency characteristics well into adulthood. It also suggests that reflection can be a vehicle for catharsis and personal transformation. / Graduation date: 2003

This study is a critical analysis of the discourse on childhood resilience and the politics of teaching resilience to "kids at risk" in inner-city schools. Resiliency research is rooted in the early psychology studies of children's coping and competence. By the 1970s, researchers were observing children who appeared invulnerable to traumatic events. These children were later described as resilient, and resilience was defined as bouncing back from adversity. Today, resilience has become an ideological code for social conformity and academic achievement. My analysis problematizes "childhood resilience" and "teaching resilience" and examines two dangerous shifts in the mainstream resiliency research over the past several decades. In one shift, resilience slipped from an anomaly in the context of complex trauma to being claimed as the social norm of the dominant society. In another shift, the context of resiliency research slipped from traumatized to disadvantaged populations. Consequently, teaching resilience in inner-city schools is a popular topic among professional child and youth advocates in BC. But these two shifts manifest as teaching socioeconomically disadvantaged children to conform to the social norms of the dominant society and as rationalizing social and educational programs that help children and youth at risk overcome obstacles. Such programs do not work to challenge systemic inequalities. I undertook a discourse analysis and an interpretive inquiry in identifying three resiliency discourses: the first is a dominant expert discourse based on quantitative studies; the second is a subordinate experiential discourse based on qualitative stories; and the third is a professional advocacy discourse that includes expert and experiential knowledge. The expert discourse derives from psychometric studies of resilient-identified children, and the experiential discourse emanates from the psychotherapeutic narratives of resilient-identified adults. The advocacy discourse emerges from educators, psychologists, and social workers who advocate on behalf of children and youth at risk. The data include resiliency texts, focused interviews, and relevant fieldnotes. I developed criteria for critiquing and recognizing resilience, explored potential intersections between the expert and experiential discourses, and interpreted risk and resiliency themes in the advocacy discourse. In challenging the dominant discourse, I argue that resilience is not a fixed set of traits that can be reified and replicated. Moreover, I argue that complex trauma and trauma recovery are essential to any construct of resilience and that resilience is pluralistic, contingent, and always in process. My study recommends collaborative resiliency research that focuses on trauma and that values experiential knowledge and attends to class and cultural diversity. It also recommends that the professional advocacy community re-focus on risk and work toward developing social programs and critical pedagogies that challenge structural oppression and systemic discrimination.

This study offers a brief review of the literature on resilience. The review served as a basis for designing a qualitative study to observe how resilience develops in survivors of breast cancer. Survivors are those who lead productive, satisfying and/or inspirational lives, after their treatment has ended. By using qualitative data collection methods and post hoc data analysis, a purposive sampling of 11 women, in the Midwest, resilient survivors of breast cancer were studied. These women were asked to write brief autobiographies, detailing the important factors and contexts that were evidence of the development of resilience in themselves. Tape recorded interviews allowed participants to add to or delete from their autobiographies.The findings showed the eleven participants shared six common characteristics: (1) making a spiritual connection; (2) having meaningful work; (3) engaging in social activism; (4) being a self-directed learner; (5) living a healthy lifestyle; and (6) expressing a wide range of feelings. In addition, the taped interviews revealed the importance of creativity and authentic relationships. A resilience wheel illustrates the definition of resilience, i.e., as a positive attitude about one's body, mind, spirit and emotions, manifested by living a healthy lifestyle; engaging in meaningful work; forming and maintaining authentic relationships; and-expressing a wide range of feelings appropriately. The study demonstrated resilience is more than effective coping. It is observed and characterized by others as a zest for life.Among these participants, resilience/zest for life was found to have developed in their youth, when they identified with a positive role model/s, who modeled resilient attitudes/values. As children they internalized these values, acting on them in small ways, until adulthood when a life event triggered a shift. As adults they, then, claimed these internalized values as "my own philosophy."Although there was not sufficient evidence to discuss resilience as a developmental process in adulthood, the ages of the participants (40-77) imply the process of learning and growing continues throughout the life span.Suggestions for teaching resilience are offered along with recommendations for future research. / Department of Educational Leadership

Thesis (MPsy(Specialisation))--University of South Australia, 2003.