Understanding the relationship between important adults and at-risk youth and the impact on resilience

Resilience has received more attention over the past several decades. However, researchers have often disagreed on what constitutes resilience which has led to a debate within the literature. Most would agree that resilience includes protective factors and processes that work together to help an individual strive toward adaptation despite being exposed to various risks. Three main groups of protective factors have been identified which include individual factors, family factors, and environmental/community factors. While earlier research focused on identifying protective factors, there has been a recent emphasis on examining the process of how protective factors interface to impact development.;Throughout the literature on resilience, researchers have found that children who have a positive relationship with a caring adult are generally able to ‘bounce back’ even if they are exposed to numerous risk factors. What remains unclear is what specific elements of these relationships are beneficial, how these relationships can serve as a protective factor, and whether these relationships can be fostered.;This dissertation reviews the literature on relationships with supportive adults, with a focus on relationships between adolescents and adults. Several factors that have been found to be important are identified and elaborated upon. This dissertation culminates in the presentation of a research study developed to gain a better understanding of relationships between important adults and youth during the period of adolescence. The study sampled both adolescents and adults, with adolescents reporting on a current relationship and adults reporting on a relationship from their adolescence in an attempt to understand whether individuals perceive their relationships in a different manner at different times in their lives. Participants completed several questionnaires as well as a semi-structured interview. This is the first study known to this researcher to interview both adolescents and adults who are actively involved in outpatient therapy about their relationships with non-parental adults and to ask participants directly about how they believe the relationship developed.;Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. Spearman's rho was used to compute correlations between variables. There were five hypotheses for this study. The first hypothesis was that participants who experience a greater number of negative life events will value their relationship with their important adult more than individuals who experience a fewer number of life events. The second hypothesis was that participants who report valuing their relationship with the important adult will score higher on a measure of resilience than participants who rate their relationship low on a measure of relationship value. The third hypothesis was that more than half of the adult participants who answer the question, “other than your parent, who was the most important person in your life during your adolescence”, by naming an adult will report that they would have named a peer had they been asked the same question during their adolescence. Fourth, it was hypothesized that adult participants would be more likely to identify important adults than adolescents as the initial person selected in response to the first interview question. And the final hypothesis was that adults would score higher on a measure of relationship value than adolescent when rating their relationships with the non-parental adult they identified.;Hypothesis four was the only hypothesis that was supported. Subsequent analyses indicated there were significant correlations between some of the variables including a positive correlation between feeling the person believed in them with higher ratings on the resilience measure (Sense of Relatedness Scale [REL], Resource index [RES]) within the adolescent sample. In addition, total number of negative life events was negatively correlated with the optimism subscale in the total sample. All the interviews were transcribed in their entirety and content analyses revealed the following themes regarding relationships with important adults: being there, being nonjudgmental, making an effort to understand, encouragement, listening, problem solving, advice giving, and providing safety.