Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This three-paper dissertation seeks to advance the conceptual understanding of resilience among lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. Interviews with service-providers (n = 16) and LGBTQ youth (n = 19) were conducted and analyzed, using Grounded Theory (GT) methodologies. The first paper conceptualizes how participants understand the construct of resilience and the associated concepts (i.e., adversity, positive adaptation). Three relevant categories are reported: (1) facing adversities across contexts, (2) growing up in the age of marriage equality, and (3) “doing well” while still in pain. Provided extensive adversities LGBTQ youth experience, participants endorsed a context-dependent understanding of “doing well” (e.g., “battling through”) rather than using normative criteria of health and wellbeing (e.g., absence of psychopathologies, presence of socially desirable outcomes). The second paper reports a substantive theory of resilience emerged in the GT study. The core category, paving pathways through the pain, suggests that youth build on their experiences of marginalization and the concomitant emotional pain to carve out personalized pathways to resilience. All youth employed the following five processes: (1) navigating safety across contexts, (2) asserting personal agency, (3) seeking and cultivating meaningful relationships, (4) un-silencing social identities, and (5) engaging in collective healing and action. While the degree of which and the ways in which youth made use of these resilience processes varied, youth focused their attention to the areas of their individual life circumstances that inflicted emotional pain and engaged more deliberately in one or more of the resilience processes related to the origins of pain. In the third paper, results of the GT study, along with other relevant literature, inform the application of a social ecological framework of resilience in working with LGBTQ youth. This framework conceptualizes that the role of social workers is to promote not only the internal capacity of LGBTQ youth but also the capacity of their social ecologies to better support them. A youth case is discussed to inform interventions across the micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. Discussion sections for each paper and the dissertation conclusion summarize study results, limitations, and implications for social work and further research.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Kenta Asakura
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2789387741