Hello everyone. Today we're going to talk about another person focused approach, in resilience science. Last time we talked about the single case strategy, for studying resilience. And today we're going to talk about larger studies of people, whole people who are identified as resilient, or not resilient. Where scientists try to figure out how do they differ? One approach that scientists have used is to study a risk group. So, people identify a group of children at risk for some reason, maybe because there's family violence, maybe because they, these are child soldiers that have survived that experience. Maybe they are homeless, whatever the risk situation is, they take the children in that risk group and then, they subdivide them into two different groups. One group of children that's doing okay, by the criteria of interest, they may be doing well in school, doing well in life in some ways that are important. And then you have the other children, who are not doing as well. So one group is the resilient group, doing okay, and the other group is the maladaptive group. And then, those two groups can be compared to see in what ways they differ. And I want to show you an example. From a recent study done in this area, which was looking at children at risk because, they were living in an emergency shelter. These are young children, living in homeless families. This is a study by Yelena Obradovic, who was doing a dissertation at the University of Minnesota. And she was interested in finding out what was making a difference for children who succeed in school, when they go to kindergarten or first grade. Even though they are living in a homeless shelter, just before they go to school. So she measured a group of children, and she was interested in whether cognitive skills make a difference, and she measured what's called executive function in these young five and six year old children. And then she followed them to school, and go information from their teachers about how they were doing. And based on the measures from the teachers, she was able to divide these children into two groups. The resilient group, who were doing well academically, and socially at school, and the maladaptive group, who were struggling when they went to school. And then she could compare those two groups, on her measure of executive function. And you see in a picture there, a little girl taking a measure of executive function, these are measure that help us understand, how children control their attention, and their thinking skills. In order to listen to the teacher at the school and pay attention to different things. And in this particular measure the child has to sort the little objects on the screen, first by shape, and then she is asked to switch and sort by color. And this requires paying attention, and listening to the rules. And what you see in the results here is that the resilient group had much, much higher scores. On this measure, this type of cognitive skills, than the group of children that were not doing as well. And this lead us to believe that perhaps these skills, which children can learn. You can train these kind of skills. Maybe these skills would help, young children living in a homeless shelter, to do better at school. And I'm donna tell your later on about. Some of our efforts to intervene, and promote these kinds of executive functions skills in children. Another example of studying groups of children in resilience comes from the project competence longitudinal study, here. I was involved in this study for many years. This was a study following a group of ordinary children, starting from when they were in elementary school around ages eight to 12, and then following them for more than 20 years as they grew up. And in this method of forming groups, we're going to form more groups than we did before, not just two groups. But in this case, we're going to form four groups, and try to compare them. And what we're, what we're adding is, we're going to group by not just looking at high risk children. But, looking at high and low risk children. Some of whom are doing well, and some of whom are not. So when these young people in our study. As they were growing up, we, when they were about 20. We put them into these groups, the, based on how they were doing in life. And we had measures of you know, how they were doing at school, how they were getting along with other people. And how well they were following the rules in, in the community,. And we could tell if they were okay or not. But we also, measured their life-long adversity. So all the time they were children and adolescents, we were interested in whether they had experienced a lot of stressful life events. And if they had high life events, we put them in the high group. And if they had low life events, we put them in the low adversity level. And all these in between areas that are shaded in gray, represent the young people who fell into the middle categories. We were interested in those four corners. People who really stood out. As doing well in high risk circumstances, which would be the resilient group, compared to kids who were doing well, but had not experienced a lot of life adversity. And we were also interested in comparing these resilient young people, with others who had experienced the same amount of adversary, but we not doing well. What, what's the difference between these groups? And then finally, we were curious to see, if there was a group that we would have called the vulnerability group, of people who had low risk but. Still we're not doing very well in life, that's more of a mystery, you know. They didn't have adversity, but they were struggling and there might be other things wrong in that situation. We found very few people in our sample. This was a study of about 200 people, followed over time. There were very few, only about three people who fell in this category. And that was not a big enough group, to compare. So, in the pictures I'm going to show you next, we're going to compare these three groups. And here's the first example. So when they were 20, we put them in these groups, and we measured all kinds of things about them. And this was a typical picture, when we looked at the data. And what you see here in the red group, is the maladaptive young people. They weren't doing very well at the age of 20. And they had much lower scores on a measure of cognitive ability, what we call an IQ score, than the other two groups of children. These, these children in green, are the children who had not experienced a lot of adversity in their life, and were doing well. And the blue children here are, are our resilient group. They had experienced just as much adversity as the red group, but they were doing very well at the age of 20. And they had very good cognitive skills. They didn't need to be wonderful superstars in how well they were thinking, they just had to have good cognitive skills. And you can see that these two groups are very much alike, and they are different than this maladaptive group. And we've found that on a lot of different characteristics, we saw the same pattern. So, there were people, for example. If you looked at parenting quality. The quality of parenting available to the three groups. The maladaptive young people, did not have close family relationships of the quality that the competent, and resilient groups had. We could also, because this was a longitudinal study. We could look back in time at these three groups. We diagnosed them, when they were 20 but, we could go back into our data and see what they were like as younger children. And we had measured IQ way back, ten years earlier when they were, you know, about ten years old, and this shows the IQ score of those three groups. When they were much younger. And you see a very similar pattern. The, the green and blue groups had average or better cognitive skills. And the kids that would grow up and struggle had lower cognitive skills on the, this type of measure. And we also were able to look at children who had very extreme adversity. Children who had very high levels of stressful life events, all during their childhood, and I've put a star here for those, the level of cognitive scores, whoops, on those children. So. The kids who in this competent group who had extreme adversity had especially high cognitive skills, and similarly the kids in the group that were not doing well when they were 20 years old, who had a lot of severe adversity had much lower cognitive skills. And what this suggested to us was that. Maybe cognitive skills play a particularly important role, when you have very, very high levels of adversity that children are dealing with. We also were able to look into the future, because we kept following these young people. And I thought you would find it interesting to see, how happy they were ten years down the road, the same three groups. We measured happiness. We asked these young adults, when they were 30 years old, how happy are you? And they rated their happiness on a scale. And here are the results. And when you see this strikingly similar pattern. The young people who had, we had seen were maladaptive we they were 20, were not looking very happy when they were 30 years old, and the competent and resilient groups but were, who were doing well when they were 20. Most of them were still doing very well when they were 30, and they expressed a lot of happiness to us. I want to show you another one more example that begins to give us a more complicated story. Going back to when these groups of, of young people were 20 years old, we also measured how planful and motivated they were for the future. Were they planning to do great things in the future? We're they motivated to do well in life? And it won't surprise you to see a very similar pattern. That the competent, and resilient young people. The people who were doing well at 20, were also very motivated about the future, and planning to do well, as they. When went forward in life. And the maladaptive group seemed very discouraged. They did not appear to be planful and motivated as a group. However, we were very interested to look more carefully at that maladaptive group, because when we followed them up at age 30, we discovered that some of the people in this group. Actually turned their life around, they're what we call late bloomers. They weren't doing well at 20, but when we went back to see them, when they were 30 years old there was a group of them who had, were doing much better. They had actually turned their lives around, and we were able to see. If that group that was going to change and become resilient were showing any signs of it when they were 20, they weren't doing well at 20. But, when we looked at their motivation and planfulness at the age of 20, we could see that they were already different from the other. Young people who were going to stay maladaptive over time. These, this group was going to be struggling at age 30 just like they were struggling at 20, but this group of young people began to change. And they were already different. They were more motivated. They weren't as motivated as this group. But, they were already showing signs, that they wanted to change their lives. And we also, looking carefully at the data, were able to see that the group that was going to change and show resilience as they made that transition to adulthood. Also was beginning to tell us that they had adults in their life, often outside of the family, that they were turning to for help to mentor them. So they had the motivation, and they had adult support. And when we went back to see them ten years later they, were not showing resilience and they hadn't been showing it before. Cases like those that change, from maladaptive to resilient over time, show a changing pattern over time. And it's very important in research on resilience to be able to capture. These changes that occur in individual lives, even if they're part of a group. Here, we have a pathway model of resilience where these kinds of changes can be seen. And you can see that in example A here. There's very little change over time. This, the people like. The example A, are showing a pretty steady course of functioning over time, and we saw that in our research on resilience. There were young people in elementary school that were doing well, who continued to do well as teenagers and young adults, but we also saw young people who changed, as you just saw in the other data. And those young people started off not doing so well, and then they began to look better, and they turned their lives around, and we need to understand how those changes happen. And there are research methods, to try to capture these kinds of changes over time. And then you see this pattern here, pattern B. Where a group is going along well, an individual's life is going well, and then there's a catastrophe that happens, and things are not going well for awhile, and then this person or this group of people recover. The case we looked at of Sarah, followed this kind of pattern. Of doing well, then having problems and then recovering. When in that case we provided intervention. We're going to be studying more examples in resilience science. Where investigators have tried to study these kind of pathways. And you'll be seeing more of that later on in the course.
