Michael Ungar

Dalhousie University | Dal · School of Social Work

Evidence-based early intervention programs for children at risk of developing psychological problems after exposure to armed conflict have been recommended as a major component in the treatment of psychosocial problems. This study examines the efficacy of a pilot school-based mindfulness intervention (SMI) and its impact on the social, emotional, a...

This study investigated the relationship between parental psychological wellbeing, parenting, children's psychological difficulties, and prosocial behavior in Kahramanmaraş earthquake‐affected families living in Türkiye in 2023. To this end, a mediation model was proposed for parental psychological distress that was hypothesized to exert an indirec...

Purpose: This study explores the experiences of youth receiving Child Welfare Services (CWS) in Nova Scotia, Canada and their preferred relationships with different service providers and how these relationships may promote or hinder their resilience at different levels of risk exposure. Method: Qualitative interviews with 23 youth (aged 14–19) were...

While the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and mental health problems (depression, suicidal thoughts, PTSD, and functional impairments) among youth is well studied, there is less known about the mediating role played by resilience for youth receiving child welfare services. This study explored the mediating effects of resil...

Emerging adults facing chronic socioeconomic stress, especially depression, lack comprehensive research on resilience factors. This study analyzed digital diary entries ( n = 338) from 57 individuals aged 18–24 in a South African township from July 2021 to April 2022. Participants highlighted relational, community, and cultural supports regardless...

The focus of this scoping review is to identify studies, reports, and other relevant sources from the peer-reviewed and grey literature that reports on refugee children’s access and barriers to portable identity, education, and health records at different stages during the migration process. The child refugee crisis has become a global concern as m...

Although many positive psychology interventions like mindfulness-based treatments (MBTs) for youth have been used with a wide array of risk exposed populations (children living in poverty, victims of violence, displaced persons, children with disabilities, etc.), the efficacy of MBTs with regard to the level and domain of risk exposure has been lar...

Paradoxically, resilience carries with it the risk of disorder. When understood systemically, this should come as no surprise. All complex systems demonstrate this same propensity for both positive and negative feedback loops. A thriving ecosystem eventually succumbs to its own dominance over its environment, using up available resources until its...

Little is known about resilience responses to COVID-19 stressors from emerging adults in minority world contexts. In this cross-sectional study, we explored the association between self-reported COVID-19 stressors and capacity for resilience in 351 emerging adults (Mean age = 24.45, SD = 2.57; 68% female) who self-identified as Black African. We we...

Purpose This study examined the mediating role of resilience and living in care experiences between risk exposure (victimization by community and adverse childhood experiences) and psychosocial outcomes (housing instability, delinquency, and post-traumatic stress reactions) for youth receiving child welfare and community services. Method Two hundr...

Background: mHealth apps are showing promise as an accessible means to improve mental health and wellbeing. However, there is limited evidence for their efficacy, particularly in periods after their initial usage, and in non-Western cultures. Objective: In this study, we explored the impact of eQuoo, an emotional fitness application which gamifies...

Recently, we reported a morning-long discussion (held 7th February 2023) that we held with a group of youth currently living in Johannesburg, South Africa, and self-identifying as Black African (Levine et al., 2023). Black African young people in South Africa typically have the least access to mental health supports, given South Africa’s Apartheid...

Background Studies elsewhere show that benevolent childhood experiences (BCEs) have protective mental health value. However, this protective value has never been investigated in an African context. Given the need to better understand what might support mental health resilience among African young people, this study explores the relationship between...

This article interrogates the continuing emphasis on personal sources of resilience; it also amends the inattention to the protective factors and processes (PFPs) that support the mental health resilience of African emerging adults. To that end, we report a study that explored which PFPs distinguished risk-exposed South African 18- to 29-year-olds...

Background The association between family adversity and young people's mental health outcomes in communities that experience economic instability has not been well explored in the South African context. Furthermore, the overtime interaction between resilience factors, family adversity, and young people's psychological functioning in African setting...

Objective The prevalence of mental health difficulties among children and adolescents is rising. This study aimed to explore early adolescents’ lived experiences of a school- and community-based prevention program, including what helps, why, and when. Method Seventy-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with early adolescents (aged 10 to...

Few empirical studies have examined the impact of the universal social services provided to ordinary youth on their resilience and psychosocial adjustment, especially youth from developing countries like China. Based on a sample of 857 high school students between the ages of 13–19 from Beijing, this article examines the pattern of social services...

In sub-Saharan countries, like South Africa, there is scant understanding of adolescent resilience to depression over time; the multisystemic resource combinations that support such resilience; and whether more diverse resource combinations yield better mental health dividends. In response, we conducted a longitudinal concurrent nested mixed method...

In this cross‐sectional study, we examine the relationship between social skills and resilience and the moderating effects of time spent in a refugee camp, parental education, and schooling on Syrian children who have been forcibly displaced to Turkey. Five hundred and twenty‐six preschool‐aged children (56.3% female, M age = 5.79) were recruited t...

As our understanding of the process of resilience has become more culturally and contextually grounded, researchers have had to seek innovative ways to account for the complex, reciprocal relationship between the many systems that influence young people's capacity to thrive. This paper briefly traces the history of a more contextualized understandi...

Across the world, rising youth depression is a pressing concern that has animated researcher and popular media attention. Mostly, this attention has missed that youth depression can be prevented, provided we can discover and mobilize protective mechanisms at different systemic levels that have differential (i.e., the most impactful) value for speci...

Child and youth mental disorders are commonly occurring and often seriously impairing in many countries across the globe [49]. In 2020, an estimated 166 million children and youth aged 10–19 years were living with a mental disorder worldwide [74], and this figure rose in the following year. A recent meta-analysis of 29 studies involving 80,879 chil...

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...

The dual-factor approach to mental health was employed to explore levels and interrelations of protective factors associated with resilience in a dataset of 30,841 schoolchildren aged 11-14 in England. ANOVA was used to contrast levels of protective factors between groups (combinations of higher/lower psychopathology and higher/lower wellbeing) and...

Using a sample of 832 young people, between 13 and 25 years old, the present investigation examined the psychometric properties of a Brazilian adaptation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28), a scale empirically derived from a three-factor resilience model that has been promising for cross-cultural research. To establish validatio...

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...

Berntsen and Rubin’s Centrality of Event Scale (CES) has been used in many different studies. This interdisciplinary and exploratory article is the first to apply the scale and to analyse event centrality in the context of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). It draws on a research sample of 449 victims-/survivors of CRSV in Bosnia and Herzegov...

Oil and gas-producing communities are threatened by a precarious oil market and global commitments to transition to a greener economy. Economic diversification has been proposed as a potential strategy for supporting the resilience of these communities amidst such challenges. We sought to explore community members’ attitudes toward the future of th...

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...

Multisystemic resilience has been conceptualised as involving a constellation of protective factors which operate at different levels to promote adaptation and thriving despite experiences of adversity. We used network modelling to discover how protective factors at two different systemic levels (intrapersonal strengths and social-ecological resour...

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...

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. Methods: Ambient air quality data from 2005 to 2019 for the two areas, Secunda and eMbalenhle, in the Highveld Air Pollution Priority Area in Mpumalanga province, South Africa w...

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...

The past decade has seen growing interest in interventions that build resilience as a complementary practice to trauma-informed care. From school-based programs focused on self-regulation and academic success to programs that support the well-being of disadvantaged populations or healthcare workers at risk of burnout, the concept of resilience is b...

Background: Although a wide range of studies discuss prevalence and risk factors associated with self-harm, protective factors that are equally important are rarely explored. Moreover, much of our understanding of young individuals who engage in self-harm come from studies conducted in Western countries with very little emphasis on marginalized gro...

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the r...

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the r...

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the r...

Is resilience always adaptive and functional, or can resilience be maladaptive in contexts where it masks vulnerability or prevents effective action to address risk? In this paper, we propose a new reading of resilience research which challenges the prevailing positive perspective and instead proposes that negative aspects of resilience are common....

There is a rich body of research addressing the issues of conflict-related sexual violence, and a similar wealth of scholarship focused on resilience. To date, however, these literatures have rarely engaged with each other. This article developed from an ongoing research project that seeks to address this gap, by exploring how victims-/survivors of...

Multisystemic resilience has been conceptualised as involving a constellation of protective factors that operate at different levels to promote adaptation and thriving despite experiences of adversity. There is preliminary evidence that network analytic techniques lend themselves well to exploring the interactions of a multitude of these protective...

How do residents of small towns that depend on oil and gas extraction or processing industries withstand economic boom and bust cycles? To answer this question, this article reports on a narrative analysis of residents’ life stories gathered from 37 adults of a small town on the Canadian prairies dependent on the oil and gas industry, employing the...

Youth resilience is the product of multiple systems. Still, the biological, psychological, social, and environmental system factors that support youth resilience are incompletely understood. How these factors interact, and the situational and cultural dynamics shaping their interconnectedness, are also under-researched. In response, we report a mul...

There is an increasing demand for brief measures of resilience that can distinguish different dimensions of successful adaptation and good quality of life despite the experience of atypical stress. We sought to develop a short measure of resilience that focuses specifically on psychological protective factors associated with resilience. From a revi...

Search for the term resilience and one finds definitions that vary widely between fields as diverse as ecology, disaster management, developmental psychology, neuroscience, engineering, and economics. Each definition emphasizes a shift in focus from breakdown and disorder to systemic recovery, adaptation, or systemwide transformation during and aft...

While different disciplines have developed theory and models to explain the resilience of the systems they study (e.g., a natural environment, a community postdisaster, the human mind, a computer network, or the economy), there is a lack of overarching theory that describes (i) whether the principles that underpin the resilience of one system are s...

This article describes a model for training service providers to provide interventions that build resilience among individuals who have experienced adversity. The Tutor of Resilience model emphasizes two distinct dimensions to training: (1) transforming service providers' perceptions of intervention beneficiaries by highlighting their strengths and...

Multisystemic Resilience brings together for the first time in one volume a wide range of resilience experts. By placing side-by-side the writing of psychologists, epigeneticists, ecologists, architects, disaster specialists, engineers, sociologists and public health researchers (to name just a few of the disciplines represented), this innovative v...

The economic and social well-being of rural, "resource-cursed" communities can depend on the boom-bust cycles of a single industry like oil and gas. This study used a constructivist, inductive approach to identify the challenges placed on families in one such community and the processes that strengthen family resilience. Semi-structured interviews...

Social anxiety affects millions worldwide and is increasing in prevalence. Resilience factors may be important for managing social anxiety, but currently, our understanding of the relationship between resilience and social anxiety is limited. In this study, we explored associations between social anxiety and two forms of resilience (psychological a...

Exposure to severe caregiver conflict and associated stress is detrimental to adolescent mental health. While there has been interest in factors that protect the mental health of affected adolescents, this interest has rarely accounted for how the situational and cultural context influence the positive impact of specific protective factors associat...

Women remain vastly underrepresented in the oil and gas workforce. As such, they are subject to gender-based discrimination and harassment, perpetuated by a hyper masculine work culture, yet little is known about their experiences working on the front lines. Guided by feminist interpretive inquiry, the purpose of this research was to understand the...

Adolescents’ ability to function well under adversity relies on a network of interrelated support systems. This study investigated how consecutive age groups differ in the interactions between their support systems. A secondary data analysis of cross‐sectional studies that assessed individual, caregiver, and contextual resources using the Child and...

In contexts of exposure to atypical stress or adversity, individual and collective resilience refers to the process of sustaining wellbeing by leveraging biological, psychological, social and environmental protective and promotive factors and processes (PPFPs). This multisystemic understanding of resilience is generating significant interest but ha...

A scoping review of interventions to build resilience

Background Systems integration to promote the mental health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children works towards developing a spectrum of effective, community-based services and supports. These services and supports are organised into a coordinated network, build meaningful partnerships with families and address their cultural and lingui...

To investigate young people’s experiences of living in a community dependent on resource extraction and processing industries during boom-bust economic cycles, we used a qualitative multi-method approach to engage 50 youth ages 13–24 in a study of resilience and well-being. As part of our analysis of resilience processes, we examined how young peop...

Purpose: In situations of adversity, young people draw on individual, relational, and contextual (community and cultural) resources to foster their resilience. Recent literature defines resilience as a capacity that is underpinned by a network of interrelated resources. Although empirical studies show evidence of the value of a network approach, l...

This paper reports on the changing dynamics of a small town’s social-ecological system (SES) concerning oil and gas industry boom-bust economic cycles and both the vulnerability and resilience of the town over the past 30 years. With the goal to understand how resource-based single industry impact social-ecological systems, we developed indicators...

More research is needed to properly represent social-ecological system (SES) interactions that support the integrity of biological and cultural, i.e., biocultural, relationships in places experiencing environmental, economic, and social change. In this paper we offer a novel methodology to address this need through the development of place-based in...

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...

Resilience is a dynamic process of positive adaptation to significant adversity. While there has been substantial focus on risks and negative outcomes associated with youth migrancy, there is limited evidence of the relationship between the adversity of migration, and resilience, wellbeing, and positive mental health in adolescents. This internatio...

Theories of resilience across different systems (biological, psychological, social, environmental) share common ground but vary widely depending on the discipline in which they have been constructed. There has, however, been a growing convergence in systemic thinking to explain the complexity of positive growth under conditions of adversity with gl...

Building resilience to violent extremism has featured in preventing violent extremism efforts for over a decade. Validated and standardized cross-cultural measures can help identify protective capacities and vulnerabilities toward violent extremism for young people. Because drivers for violent extremism are multi-factorial, a measure of resilience...

More is known about the factors that predict mental disorder than about the factors and processes that promote positive development among individuals exposed to atypically high levels of stress or adversity. In this brief Review of the science of resilience, we show that the concept is best understood as the process of multiple biological, psycholo...

Background: There is growing interest in the relationship between physical and psychosocial factors related to resilience to better understand the antecedents of health and successful adaptation to challenges in and out of school, and across the lifespan. To further this understanding, a trans-disciplinary approach was used to investigate the assoc...

A multisystemic model of resilience suggests that the capacity of one system to cope with atypical stress improves the capacity of co-occurring systems. In this paper, we review research demonstrating this relationship, where the more resilient caregivers are, the more likely children are to experience the promotive and protective factors they requ...

This article reflects on common challenges and lessons learned during the evaluation of gang prevention programs based on case studies of three federally funded Canadian programs. Elements of evaluation design, implementation, data analysis and reporting of results are discussed. More specifically, the article highlights issues that occur when eval...

Mothers’ experiences during pregnancy have important effects on children’s developmental outcomes. A significant body of literature suggests that effects of the maternal social environment can become biologically embedded to affect the health of her foetus, with mothers’ stress during pregnancy contributing to a range of child outcomes across devel...

Background Contextually relevant interventions are needed to support the well-being of at-risk adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the large number of children who have been orphaned, such as by HIV/AIDS, are in need of interventions to foster their resilience. Objective The goal of this study was to investigate the efficacy of the B...

Couple and family therapists are rarely the focus of research yet are critical for positive outcomes in therapy. The attempts to integrate evidence-based approaches into the practice of couple and family therapy have been controversial resulting in passionate and at times divisive dialogue. The aims of this research project were to explore what do...

This paper identifies hidden resilience processes among adolescents and young adults who have had involvement in drug trafficking. The participants were 551 adolescents and young people, aged 12-20 years (M = 16.01; SD = 1.548) from both genders, 55.4% of whom were boys. They were recruited from three social service institutions located in the stat...

The potential positive or negative impact of the environment on young people’s wellbeing may vary by a young person’s level of vulnerability and the quality of the environment. To examine this relationship, analysis of a 4-wave (W1–W4) study of 11- to 19-year-old youth (MW1 = 14.0, SDW1 = 1.4) from communities facing heightened challenges in Atlant...

The Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM) is one of the most popular measures of resilience. In this paper, we investigate the CYRM using Rasch analysis to explore and improve its psychometric properties, leading to a more robust measure of resilience.Cross-sectional data were obtained from a questionnaire administered to n = 408 individuals in...