Luctor et emergo, exploring contextual variance in factors that enable adolescent resilience to flooding

Abstract

Knowing that by 2020, 175 million children and adolescents are expected to annually be affected by “natural” disasters, this article sets out to explore what factors enable their resilience. It additionally questions to what extent resilience enabling factors are similar across the globe, or context-specific. It draws on quantitative empirical evidence (N=1887 adolescents) from flood prone areas in Indonesia, Burkina Faso and Bolivia. A resilience-enabling model, containing three internal factors (cognitive, behavioral, spiritual) and four external resilience factors (social, political, economic and environmental) is studied. The findings firstly show that what enables resilience is not an either-or matter, but that in chorus, both individual traits as well as socio-environmental resources have a protective function. Secondly, regardless of the adolescents' context, especially spirituality and social relations are perceived most helpful. Eye-catching is that these non-Western adolescents show a high sense of duty and high levels of empathy and responsiveness to others. Larger differences are found when it concerns the protective function of the cognitive, physical environmental and economic factor. Thirdly what helps adolescents to deal with flooding proves to be influenced by their sex, age and exposure to flooding. Male adolescents' experience more support than the females, from both the internal and external factors. In addition, as the adolescents' age increases, the protective function of the internal resilience factors (cognitive and behavioral) increases and that of the external factors (economic and physical-environmental) decreases. The study concludes that when aiming to enhance adolescent resilience, it is of great importance to understand resilience as a multi-factorial concept and to identify when to assume likeliness and when to take context specific approaches.