Welcome back. We're continuing with our discussion of the methods used in resilient science. We've been focusing on person focused techniques where the unit of it, unit of analysis is a whole person, and now we're going to switch to several segments about variable focused methods. In these methods, scientists focus on measuring and analyzing the relationships among different kinds of variables. And today we're going to start by talking about risk. Variables measuring risk, and risk gradients. And in the next two segments we'll continue on. With other topics. Risk factors are predictors of undesirable outcomes. And the resilient scientists quickly observed that risk factors rarely occur in isolation. They often occur in batches, and it was important to be able to count up, how many were happening in an individual child's life. There are a lot of different examples of risk factors in the study of resilience. Some of them are socioeconomic factors such as poverty or living in a dangerous neighborhood. And there are a lot of adverse life experiences that are predictors of difficulties in life, and those include a wide range of problems and experiences such as acute, and chronic life events, controllable, or uncontrollable life events that happened to people and then very, life events vary in severity. Here's a list of adverse life experiences some example, and there have been many. Kinds of studies on these adversities. They range from child maltreatment, and kidnapping to death of a parent. Or the experience of being in an earthquake or other natural disaster. When people measure risk, and they count up risk factors, they often create a risk gradient that looks like this. Here I have an example, this risk gradient comes from a study of children living in an emergency shelter, they had a lot of risk factors in their lives. And over he, here on this side I have a list of the risk factors that have been counted up. Just yes, or no has this child experienced this risk factor. And those risk factors are summed up here. On this axis. And you can see that in this shelter, there were children who had none of these risk factors and there were children who had six. No children had seven. These were eight to ten year old children at the time this research was done. And what we were looking at, trying to predict, was behavior problems. These are called externalizing problems. That includes things like disruptive aggressive behavior. Hitting people or being disobedient. And on this particular measure, the child behavior checklist. The average in the general population is 50. And if you're doing. Better than average, you have a lower score. And if you're doing worse than average, you have a higher score. Children who have scores up this high really often need to have a clinical referral. They're having serious problems. And what you can see here. That's typical of a risk gradient, is that as the level of risk rises, that's measured by counting up this risk factors, the level of average problems in each group of children keeps going up. Also, you can measure another risk variable. In the first diagram, I showed you that we were predicting disruptive, aggressive behavior. But in this diagram, I've switched to another risk factor. It's the same children, the same measure of risk. But now, we're looking at the outcome of hunger which is another risk factor. Hunger predicts difficulties in child development. And what you see in this picture is that. As the risk level is rising, the likelihood that you also are experiencing another risk factor, hunger, is also rising. A different kind of risk gradient can be seen in studies of disaster. And war, and these often called dose gradients, which means how much exposure have you had to the terrible situation, and just as in the case of other risk gradients, as children experience higher doses of exposure. To sever adversity. In these kinds of situations, they often show more symptoms of trauma or other problems. And in those gradients, the indicators of adversity can be measuring physical. Destruction, how close you are for example to the epicenter of an earthquake. Or it could be measuring your psychological proximity. For example, in a terrible tragedy where there, where there's major loss of life, if a child knows. And is close to someone who has died, the impact is likely to be greater for that child than if all the people who died in the disaster are strangers to that person. And in these kind of dose gradients you're understanding your perception of what's happening really matters. And we'll be talking more about that as we go forward. Here's an example of a dose gradient of a classic study of a sniper attack. This attack occurred at a Los Angeles school in 1984. And Robert Pynoos and his colleagues did this study after a month had passed after this incident, he went to the school and measured the symptoms the children had and the symptoms are down here on whats called the reaction index score, and let me go further and show you. What that index measures. It measures trauma symptoms. And here are some examples of items from there. Children who get upset when they think about the terrible event, children who avoid reminders. They're having bad dreams, they're jumpy or startle real easily. These are all symptoms of post traumatic stress problems or disorders. And they sum up your score on that measure. So, let's go back to the dose gradient. In this incident a sniper started firing into a school yard, and a child was killed right on the playground, and other children were pinned down on the playground afraid that they were going to be killed. And they could see the body of the other child. And the sniper also was firing into the windows of the school, so the teachers and children in the school were taking cover, but everybody was afraid of their life, but, for their life, but the children on the playground were in the greatest danger. And what you can see here is how proximity to danger was related to how many symptoms the children had. These are the average scores on this measure for the children who were on the playground. And they had very, very high stress, trauma symptom scores a month after this had happened. The children who were in danger in the school, because there were shots being fired through the windows, also had very high levels of trauma symptoms. There were other children who were not in the school at the time, they had already left for the day, they were on their way home, or in the neighborhood, or something like that, their scores were lower. Although they knew what had happened, and they knew the child that had died. And then you had still other children that were absent that day, that were staying home for some other reason, or that were on a vacation of some sort. And what you can see is that as the. Proximity ta, to severe danger increased on this dose gradient. The level of symptoms that the children experience also increased. Okay, let's move on and take a look at another example of the dose gradient. This one is, involves a natural disaster, but a natural disaster we're going to talk about later in the course that occurred. In the middle of a war going on in Sri Lanka. This is the 2004 tsunami that devastated much of that area in Indonesia and southeast Asia. And what Catani and her colleagues examined in this dose gradient was the, they counted up a whole list of life events. That could be difficult for children, known to be risk factors. And they added up ex, events related to war exposure, tsunami exposure, and family violence. Family violence could be going on regardless of war, and regardless of a tsu, of a tsunami. And what you see here is a dose gradient showing that as. The overall combination level of risk is increasing in these children. Their symptoms on another PTSD trauma measure is also increasing. What these dose and risk gradients illustrate is how on average. Problems can increase in groups of children as their exposure to adversity, or their risk level is going up. But that's not the whole story. These are the average levels of risk. And you can see that the children represented by the red dots, are showing the typical average level. Of problems on this measure that you see in the group. However there are other children who are look like they're off the gradient. They are not where you expect them to be. This child is doing much worse than you would expect for someone who has no risk, or very low level of exposure, and there could be a number of reasons for that. Could be an extremely vulnerable person. It could be that we didn't measure all the important risk factors. And here we have a child that's of particular interest to us in this course. This is a child who is doing much better than we would expect. They are showing resilience in this situation. And the question is how do we explain, and account for that child and how well they're doing. And in the next segment we're going to look at moderators of risk and pr, promotive factors. And that will begin to give us some ideas about what makes a difference. What are the resources, the protective factors,. That may explain how well that child is doing. [SOUND]
