| Purpose : |
“Pathways to Resilience” takes an innovative approach to understanding how at-risk children and youth nurture and sustain resilience through their contact with four of the primary service providers that influence the social determinants of their growth and development: Child Welfare, Mental Health, Corrections and Education.
The purpose of the project is to understand the role played by mandated and non-mandated services in moderating the effects of stress in children's lives and whether these services result in more or less resilient children. It will underscore the pathways children travel through multiple systems towards resilience, as well as the most important protective mechanisms encountered that affect their growth trajectories.
The hypothesis is that children are active participants in how they and their families navigate their way through systems of care, each service provider contributing to a complex weave of services that challenge or promote at-risk children's well-being. Further, it is hypothesized that services respond to the demands made on them in ways that either promote children's resilience to adversity or expose children unintentionally, through their multiple interventions, to further risk. Children's pathways through multiple services to health remain largely unknown, even though it is documented that most at-risk children and youth form a disproportionately high percentage of clients of more than one mandated service.
Specifically this project will study retrospectively and longitudinally service use patterns among a population of youth-at-risk and their families. The team will examine the relationship between findings from detailed file reviews and other forms of qualitative investigation, as well as measurement of service use across systems, with results from the administration of measures to assess young people's levels of life stress and individual, relational, community and cultural aspects of resilience.
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