Linda Theron

University of Pretoria | UP · Department of Educational Psychology

Until researchers and theorists account for the complex relationship between resilience and culture, explanations of why some individuals prevail in the face of adversity will remain incomplete. This edited volume addresses this crucial issue by bringing together emerging discussions of the ways in which culture shapes resilience, the theory that i...

The factors and processes that enable child and youth resilience vary across situational and cultural contexts. Even so, many studies of resilience theorize positive adaptation in contextually neutral ways and/or perpetuate resilience accounts that mirror minority world realities. To discourage a continuation of that problematic tendency, this chap...

This special issue is focused on the lessons learned from the COVID-19 health crisis, showcasing new cross-cultural research from different countries, such as rural/urban US, South Africa, and Australia. The aim οf the special issue is to highlight new knowledge related to pandemic-related impacts, as well as underscore variables that will promote...

Does historic school engagement buffer the threats of disrupted schooling – such as those associated with the widespread COVID-19-related school closures – to school engagement equally for female and male high school students? This article responds to that pressing question. To do so, it reports a study that was conducted in 2018 and 2020 with the...

Violence against children (VAC) is one of the most significant, widespread, and preventable threats to human development in our world today. Children represent the future of our society, and as such, understanding and addressing VAC is critical to building cultures and systems that promote a just and sustainable peace. This edited volume aims to pr...

Background Air pollution is a global, public health emergency. The effect of living in areas with very poor air quality on adolescents’ physical health is largely unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of adverse respiratory health outcomes among adolescents living in a known air pollution hotspot in South Africa. Methods...

Communities often face numerous challenges and opportunities—situations that may be reduced to specific domains by researchers, policy makers and interventionists. This study informs and animates a new “flourishing community” model that seeks to build collective capacity to respond to challenges and opportunities. Our work is a response to children...

Global heating is considered one of the greatest threats to human health and well-being. Supporting human resilience to heating threats is imperative, but under-investigated. In response, this article reports a study that drew together results from quantitative data on perceptions of thermal comfort and mechanisms for coping with thermal discomfort...

There is little knowledge on how children perceive psychosocial supports and seek help in resource-constrained settings. The aim of this study was to establish these perspectives among 22 children aged 7–10 years living in a disadvantaged community in Kenya. Children discussed available resources in response to three scenarios of common life stress...

Children living in resource-constrained environments have high levels of unmet psychosocial needs. Through participatory focus groups, we juxtaposed the views of 55 children aged 7–10 years from resource-constrained settings in South Africa and Pakistan, with those of 96 service providers, focusing on available sources of psychosocial support. Chil...

Purpose In this paper the authors share, and reflect critically on, the experience of using digital storytelling (DS) methods in a South African township. We interrogate the innovations prompted as we operationalized DS in a context that has historically prized collectivist values and that experiences chronic resource constraints. Design/methodolo...

Young adults are often scapegoated for not complying with COVID-19 mitigation strategies. While studies have investigated what predicts this population’s compliance and non-compliance, they have largely excluded the insights of African young people living in South African townships. Given this, it is unclear what places young adult South African to...

This chapter presents a single case study that illustrates the complexity of emerging adult resilience in the context of relentless socio-ecological risk. The case, which is instrumental, is drawn from the Resilient Youth in Stressed Environments (RYSE) study, South Africa. It foregrounds the positive adjustment over time of Simphiwe, an isiZulu-sp...

There is substantial evidence that exposure to family adversity significantly and negatively impacts positive adolescent development by placing adolescents at increased risk of experiencing developmental difficulties, including conduct problems. Although the mechanisms responsible for these effects are still largely unknown, a novel line of inquiry...

Caregiver monitoring and warmth have protective mental health effects for adolescents, including vulnerable adolescents. However, combinations of the aforesaid parenting behaviours and their relationship with adolescent mental health are underexplored, especially among younger and older South African (SA) adolescents challenged by structural disadv...

Using person-centered latent profile analyses, this article reports two distinct sub-groups—nominal versus robust cultural allegiance—that characterize how a sample of 14- to 24-year-olds from stressed environments in South Africa ( n = 576, n females = 314, n males = 257) and Canada ( n =V481; n females = 270, n males = 211) engage with four cultu...

School engagement is associated with the resilience of adolescents living in stressed environments in sub-Saharan Africa. Even so, there is scant understanding of the antecedents of African students’ school engagement. In response, this article reports the results of an exploratory study conducted in 2018 and 2020 with a sample of 172 adolescents (...

There is widespread recognition that stressors related to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) jeopardize the development of emerging adults, more particularly those living in disadvantaged communities. What is less well understood is what might support emerging adult resilience to COVID-19-related stressors. In response, this article reports a 5-we...

Pollution is harmful to human physical health and wellbeing. What is less well established is the relationship between adolescent mental health – a growing public health concern – and pollution. In response, we systematically reviewed studies documenting associations between pollution and mental health in adolescents. We searched Africa Wide, Medli...

Introduction Over the past 10-15 years there has been increasing attention to the potential impact of extreme weather events (EWE) on children's mental health. Because sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is experiencing an increase in the frequency and severity of these events, we decided it was necessary to conduct a systematic review. The focus was to exami...

Background Whilst there is little uncertainty about the deleterious impact of pollution on human and planetary health, pollution’s impact on adolescent mental health is less well understood. This is particularly true for young people in underdeveloped and developing world contexts, about whom research is generally lacking. Furthermore, although ado...

What enables the resilience of African emerging adults who live in sub-Saharan Africa and must contend with an everyday reality that is characterized by structural disadvantage and related hardship? This question directed the exploratory qualitative research that we report in this article. Its genesis was the relative inattention to the resilience...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as being the most vulnerable region to climate change impacts. A major concern is the increase in extreme weather events (EWE) such as storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and landslides in SSA and their potential to affect the health and...

Traditionally resilience research has neglected understandings of what enables young people living in the global South, including South Africa, to develop well when their life circumstances are challenging. The fact that more recently resilience studies have begun to explain how context and culture outside of the global North shape processes of pos...

Resilience, or the process of adjusting well to adversity, is a process that requires input from social ecologies. The resilience literature is unambiguous that a crucial source of such social-ecological support is teachers. However, most accounts of how teachers enable resilience are drawn from Global North studies (i.e. studies in the more develo...

In contexts of high levels of structural disadvantage, such as South Africa, resilience among children and youth becomes increasingly important to buffer children and youth from the negative effects of adversity. This article reports on a systematic review of research conducted in South Africa over the period 2009 to 2017 on the resilience of child...

In contexts of high levels of structural disadvantage, such as South Africa, resilience among children and youth becomes increasingly important to buffer children and youth from the negative effects of adversity. This article reports on a systematic review of research conducted in South Africa over the period 2009 to 2017 on the resilience of child...

Given rampant conditions of poverty and inequality facing the majority of South African young people, there has been growing interest over recent years in the resilience processes that enable youth to navigate through such adversities and achieve well-being and accomplishment in life. Traditionally, resilience has tended to foreground intrapersonal...

Our aim in this article is to explore what is known about resilience in women and girls; to theorise how gender-roles are reflected in women's and girls' resilience processes; and to explore how apposite researchers' explanations of resilience are for black South African girls. We¹ “Our” and “we” refers to both the first and second author. conducte...

Research evidence should inform policy and practice. This is integral to the mandate of ethical research. Especially in contexts, such as sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where disadvantage is rife, researchers have a duty to apply credible research results toward enabling improved life worlds, above all for children and young people. Fulfilling this obli...

Purpose The factor structure of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-28) was originally established using a Canadian sample. This factor structure was not confirmed in a study with New Zealand youth. Given such variability, the current study investigated the factor structure of the CYRM-28 in a sample of Sesotho-speaking South African youth...

Resilience, or being well-adjusted despite facing adversity that predicts negative life outcomes, is a process that is scaffolded by resilience-enabling supports. How well resilience-enabling resources support positive adjustment depends, in part, on adolescents’ perceptions of the availability and usefulness of such resources. Currently, there is...

Globally the well-being of child protection social workers (CPSWs) is placed at risk by the taxing nature of their profession. In response, there have been international calls for the prioritization of CPSWs’ resilience. Despite the call to enhance the resilience of CPSWs, to date, only five research studies have explored resilience processes in CP...

Theories of youth resilience neglect youths’ lived experiences of what facilitates positive adjustment to hardship. The Pathways-to-Resilience Study addressed this by inviting Canadian, Chinese, Colombian, New Zealand and South African (SA) youths to share their resilience-related knowledge. In this article I report the challenges endemic to the ru...

Globally, social workers protect, among others, children who are in need of care and protection. Child protection social workers protect children by means of statutory intervention. Concomitant professional risks threaten child protection social workers’ well-being and competence, resulting in sub-standard services, attrition and calls for child pr...

To fully understand how culture and resilience are intertwined, the use of innovative qualitative research methods is imperative, irrespective of a study’s design. However, more important is astute choice and use of innovative methods. Although many authors advocate the use of novel, interactive methods in studies of marginalized youth, they seldom...

In this chapter we present the life-stories of Harmony and Atile to illustrate that young people’s resilience processes are not arbitrary. Harmony and Atile are black South African students who demonstrated positive development, despite chronic poverty and associated risks (e.g., sexual abuse). A secondary data analysis of their life-stories shows...

Extant theories of resilience, or the process of adjusting well to adversity, privilege the voices of minority-world young people. Consequently, the resilience of marginalized, majority-world youth is imperfectly understood, and majority-world social ecologies struggle to facilitate resilience in ways that respect the insights of majority-world you...

Resilience (positive adjustment to hardship) relies on a socioecologically facilitated process in which individuals navigate towards, and negotiate for, health-promoting resources, and their social ecology, in return, provides support in culturally aligned ways (Ungar, Trauma Violence & Abuse 2013;14(3):255-266). In the light of international criti...

‘’Until researchers and theorists account for the complex relationship between resilience and culture, explanations of why some individuals prevail in the face of adversity will remain incomplete. ‘Youth Resilience and Culture: Commonalities and Complexities’ addresses this crucial issue by bringing together emerging discussions of the ways in whic...

Social-ecological systems are neither culturally neutral nor do they operate at single levels. Instead, they operate at multiple levels that span local contexts and broader global ones. It is, therefore, understood that conceptualisations of resilience, along with the mechanisms that support competent adjustments to adversity, are relative to, and...

The resilience literature is increasingly drawing attention to formal service provision as a means for social ecologies to support children’s and youths’ positive adjustment to challenging life circumstances. This article interrogates the universality and simplicity of this argument. Using a secondary data analysis of the life stories of 16 resilie...

Despite the increased effort to understand resilience processes in the lives of youth, the homogeneity of a largely westernized concept needs to be challenged in studies by incorporating meanings of resilience more relevant to youth around the globe. This requires a reconsideration of the methods used to study youth resilience. This article outline...

This article reports findings from the Pathways to Resilience study, South Africa. Rooted in a social ecological understanding of resilience, this mixed-methods study investigated resilience processes of black South African youths from poverty-stricken, rural contexts. School-attending youths (n = 951) completed the Pathways to Resilience Youth Mea...

Explanations of meaning-making generally prioritise intrapersonal processes. Although making meaning is an intrapersonal process, it is also strongly influenced by person-context interactions and cultural positioning. Nevertheless, the meaning making literature has paid scant attention to how such interactivity and positioning shape meaning-making....

Life Orientation (in the Senior and Further Education and Training phases) and Life Skills (in the Intermediate Phase) is a compulsory school subject. In curriculum policy documents the purpose of LO is described as: i) empowering learners to use their talents to achieve their full physical, intellectual, personal, emotional and social potential; i...

South African designated social workers (DSWs), also known as child protection social workers (CPSWs) internationally, are placed at risk for suboptimal personal and professional functioning, given the demanding nature of their work. Consequently, there is worldwide agreement that social worker and particularly CPSW resilience should be explored. E...

Serious concerns are being raised about the well-being of South Africa’s young people. This article uses the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure to examine the relationship between services and resilience through a quantitative cross-sectional study of 1,209 Sesotho-speaking adolescents. The results indicate that no positive correlations exist bet...

Drawing on narrative data from a multiple case study, I recount the life stories of two resilient Black South African university students to theorize about the processes that encouraged these students, familiar with penury and parental illiteracy, to resile. I aimed to uncover lessons for school psychologists about resilience, and their role in its...

In the main, resilience literature explains positive adjustment to adversity in ways that are biased towards western culture. Although studies of resilience among African Americans have reported the importance of kinship, a typically Africentric concept, no studies have explored how family communities promote youths' positive adjustment, particular...

This paper offers socio‐ecological, situated perspectives on adolescent resilience derived from an application of interpretive visual methodologies to deepen understanding of adaptive youth development in diverse majority‐world cultural contexts (South Africa, Thailand, China, Mexican migration to Canada). The research is not “cross‐cultural”; by c...

If educational psychologists wish to make a meaningful difference as practitioners, both to the children they work with and the ecologies these children come from, then, knowledge and application of resilience theory is crucial. Toland and Carrigan (2011) underscore this relationship in their 2011 article in this Journal. In our contribution below,...

The Pathways to Resilience Project is an ongoing, community-based participatory research (CBPR) project. Its express focus is the exploration of how at-risk youths use formal services and/or informal, naturally occurring resources to beat the odds that have been stacked against them, with the intent of partnering with communities to promote youth r...

The study explored whether and how culturally sensitive stories can encourage resilience in young children orphaned by AIDS. The purpose of the investigation was allied to the paradigm of positive psychology, which focuses on the promotion of potential strengths to buffer children against adversity, as well as on social ecological understandings of...

When communities are challenged by AIDS-related losses, divorce, and violence, teachers become particularly important as “agents of resilience.” The authors use stories collected from nonwhite South African youth who face significant challenges to show how caring teachers who are accessible to children provide an ecological source of hope, optimism...

Studies of resilience, or the process of adjusting well to major challenges commonly associated with negative outcomes, have proliferated in recent years. Despite the popularity of this research focus, there are suggestions (anecdotal and published) that the study of resilience needs to be interrogated. In this article, I respond to these suggestio...

In this article, we communicate transformative findings from a case study on the resilience of a young woman with fragile X syndrome (FXS), a genetic condition involving mental impairment and physical, emotional, and behavioral challenges. We explored the resilience of "Lucy," a spirited 16-year-old North American, using informal interviews with he...

HIV and AIDS threaten to erode the wellbeing of teachers who are faced with an increasing number of children rendered vulnerable by the pandemic. This article explores the usefulness of a supportive group intervention, Resilient Educators (REds), in supporting Lesotho teachers to respond to the HIV and AIDS-related challenges. A time-series pre- an...

South Africa currently lacks HIV counselling interventions that are youth-specific and that meet the psychosocial needs of young people living with HIV/AIDS. Indigenous strategies and interventions need to be developed that cater for the psychosocial needs of South African youth living with HIV/AIDS. By using Participatory Action Research (PAR) a C...

Previous research has attested to the power of metaphor-rich stories to enable resilience during individual therapy, but this has not been researched in a group context. We aimed to ascertain if the reading of brief stories in a group setting, with no other therapeutic intervention, would prove to be a valuable, inexpensive and accessible protectiv...

Resilience, or adaptive behavior in the face of adversity, has recently come to be understood as a phenomenon that should not be uniformly conceptualized across contexts and cultures. This emerging understanding has urged exploration of what resilience might mean in specific cultural contexts. As in other majority nation contexts, there is scant do...

We explore Exner's Rorschach Comprehensive System as a schema-processing task to understand how six Black1 South African adolescents' personal constructions informed their transactional resilience. Transactional resilience is conceptualised as a process of meaning-making of present and past experiences to knit a healthy sense of self. We first prov...

I report on a phenomenological investigation into teacher experiences of generating and interpreting drawings during their participation in the Resilient Educators (REds) intervention. All 18 teacher participants came from rural communities challenged by HIV&AIDS. I reflect critically on the ambivalence in teacher experiences of drawings to highlig...

Grounded in the examples of four impoverished, relocated youths (two Sesotho-speaking orphans in South Africa and two Mexican immigrants in Canada), we explore cultural factors as potential roots of resilience. We triangulate rich qualitative findings (visual, dialogical, and observational) to foreground the particular, as well as acknowledge the u...

An exploratory qualitative study of 16 disadvantaged youth in 5 countries suggests that making both precocious and developmentally appropriate contributions to their families' well-being is advantageous to adolescents coping with chronic adversity. All youth were known to be doing well (as identified by community advisors) and showed patterns of co...

The use of drawings in social research is located within several broad yet overlapping areas of contemporary study. These include arts-based or artsinformed research (Knowles & Cole, 2008), participatory visual methodologies (De Lange, Mitchell, & Stuart, 2007; Rose, 2001), textual approaches in visual studies in the social sciences (Mitchell, 2011...

This paper reports on methodological innovations in an ecological investigation of protective processes in the experiences of youths in transition in eight locations around the globe. Several visual methods were enlisted in working with thriving early adolescents in challenging transitional or relocational situations. Resilience is viewed here as p...

Our researchi with adolescents highlights the necessity of projecting the voices of youth in order to come to understand and share their experiences fully (Cameron & Creating Peaceful Learning Environments Team, 2002a, 2002b). Teenagers have powerful statements to make about their own situations. Their narratives are powerful: They are insightful;...

We begin this book with a section that offers something of what Jane Miller (1995) describes as the ’autobiography of the question’ or, in this case, the autobiography of the question of method. With an increased recognition of the importance of the positioning of the researcher, the place of reflexivity in qualitative work, and the emergence of wo...

Multitudes of youth worldwide leave their homes, permanently or temporarily, and take up street life because of harsh personal and contextual factors that are out of their control (Donald, Lazarus, & Lolwana, 2010). Youth who adopt street life lose opportunities to play, to be educated, and to experience the rest needed for their physical and menta...

All research is regulated by ethical principles that try to ensure that research participants are not harmed in any way by their participation in a research project. Universities and research bodies typically have robust ethical procedures and ethical codes that try to guarantee that researchers do ethical research.

Picturing research: drawing as visual methodology offers a timely analysis of the use of drawings in qualitative research. Drawing can be a method in itself, as in the research area of Visual Studies, and also one that complements the use of photography, video, and other visual methodologies. This edited volume is divided into two sections. The fir...

The aim of this article is to hear the voices of HIV- and AIDS-affected educators regarding their experiences of the psychosocial effect that the HIV and AIDS pandemic has on them as well as to voice their experiences of how Resilient Educators (REds), a support programme to enable educators affected by HIV and AIDS towards resilience, enabled them...

‘Resilient Educators’ (REds) is a group intervention programme designed to empower teachers affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and is research in progress. In 2007, 99 participants from various primary and high schools from three South African provinces were involved in a community-based intervention. A one-group pre-test, post-test design was util...

Only quite recently have researchers begun to conceptualize street youth as resilient. The findings from our qualitative phenomenological study with 20 adolescent street youth in South Africa augment this transformed conceptualization. Using individual and focus-group interview data, we offer a novel argument that street youth resilience is embedde...

The phenomenon of resilience among street children as a group of at-risk youth goes unnoticed, since they are not typically regarded as resilient. Street children are mostly categorised as vulnerable youth who need care and support, and this deficit view ignores the assets and resources that enable them towards resilience. Nevertheless, street chil...

Given the growing emphasis in research and service provision on strengths rather than deficits, the focus on youth support in the South African Children's Act of 2005 and the lack of educational, therapeutic and other resources for most South Africans, insight into, and transdisciplinary commitment to, resilience is crucial. Resilience, or the phen...

Using rich qualitative data, we describe the ecosystemically-embedded protective antecedents that enabled 10 white, Afrikaans-speaking adolescents from divorced families towards resilience. The description both confirms and extends what was known about the roots of adolescent resilience, post-divorce. We use these findings to capacitate educators w...

In South Africa, support is available for educators who are HIV-positive, and there are numerous initiatives to curb further HIV infections. What is lacking though is an understanding of how the HIV epidemic impacts on educators who are affected personally or professionally. For this reason a qualitative study was undertaken with 25 affected educat...

In a qualitative study of 77 South African educators, participants were asked to explain how they are affected by HIV and AIDS and how they would best like to be supported in response to this. The term 'affected' refers to educators who have colleagues, learners or loved ones who are HIV-positive or who have died from HIV-related illnesses, or thos...

Manganese poisoning (MP) is one of many chronic, degenerative conditions that result in spousal caregiver stress. Partners who were once fully functioning become strangers to those who love them. In time, spousal caregivers may come to view their erstwhile partners as patients, jailers, monsters, or bratty children. We explore spousal caregiver per...

The nature of educators’ work has changed dramatically, in part because of the challenges of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. Despite these multiple and relentless challenges which educators contend with, and despite numerous calls for educator empowerment to cope with HIV -related challenges, little has been done up until now to support educators. By re...

Does Life Orientation speak to the needs of learners who live and learn in townships? The answer is a partial yes as revealed by the Batsha-Life Orientation study which documents Grade 9 township learner opinion of the learning area Life Orientation. This documentation is based on survey research (n = 934) in Gauteng; North-West and Free State prov...

Some Grade 4 educators have expressed feelings of ineptitude regarding the support of ESL (English Second Language) learners with limited English proficiency as they do not know how to support these learners effectively. Their litany emphasises ESL educators’ need for supportive and preventive intervention. A Story-based Language Enrichment Program...

This article presents the concept of resilience as it is understood by South African township youth and the role that Life Orientation (a compulsory school subject that aims at equipping youth to deal with and master their difficult circumstances) plays in developing and sustaining their resilience. The implication for practice is clear: Resilience...

In this article we report on a study on the effects of adoption on the school performance of birth-mothers (adolescent mothers who choose to hav e their ba bies ado pted) who return to school following adoption . The study focused on the experience of five white adolescent birthmothers. Factors impacting on school performance were identified in a l...

We report on a study aimed at understanding adolescence as a period of heightened vulnerability, and investigate Life Orientation as a possible means of addressing the risk associated with adolescence. However, if Life Orientation is to be an effective solution to the problem, it needs to respond to Life Orientation needs as perceived by adolescent...

A quasi-experimental study, which focused on inculcating resilience skills in adolescents with specific learning difficulties by means of a group intervention programme, is reported on. The results of the study suggested that adolescents with specific learning difficulties can acquire resilience skills despite obstacle-ridden circumstances, but tha...

Although mother tongue education is recommended by policymakers, researchers and language learning authorities, the reality in South Africa is that many parents/caregivers and learners believe that English is the best choice as Language of Learning and Teaching. Many English second-language (ESL) learners experience barriers to learning, because of...