Hello, we're almost done with our journey through some of the methods and models that are used in resilience science. In this segment we're going to talk about models of intervention. And in the final segment for this module we're going to take a look at an example of an intervention designed around models like these. Models of intervention have been very important since the very beginning of resilient science, because one of the most important motivating influences for this area of research was trying to learn what we can do to help children who are not doing as well in the middle of adversity. How do we promote resilience in children? Children can't wait for us to complete all of our science. We need to develop interventions as we go along and see if we can help children who need our help. There's a lot of different models, and I'll just highlight a few quickly for you. How do we think about resilience when we think about what we've learned so far about risk and assets that play a role in the pathways that children follow, and also in terms of the protective factors we may want to add into their lives? This first model goes back to something you've seen before. If this our model of how children are influenced by adversities, by risk factors or by resources, also called assets, what would we do, if we wanted to improve the outcome? Well, one strategy is we could add assets. So if we were thinking about a good outcome in terms of the achievement of a child, who is very disadvantaged, we might think about helping that child by either providing additional nutrition. We might provide them with a tutor or after school activities that might help that child do better in school. Another possibility is that we could try to prevent that risk factor from happening. Some of the risk factors that children face are preventable. Many of our public policies are designed to try to prevent risk factors that children don't need to face as a strategy for helping them have better outcomes. For example we've mentioned already that if we could prevent premature birth that would have an important effect on the way children learn in a society. Similarly, if we prevent land mines from exploding in the ground that are left over after war, we can prevent the harm from that kind of risk factor from, from damaging the life of a child. Sometimes though the risk factors that influence children, don't come directly, they come indirectly. There are risk factors that affect not the child, but assets that are very important to the child. For example, some sort of adversity could harm the home that the parent or child lives in. It could harm the school that they go to. And so if we wanted to think about intervention in this situation, what we might do is think about how to provide support. How do we protect this asset in the child's live? Whether its you know, helping them to rebuild the school or to get more food delivered, that sort of thing. In the case of something like parenting, we, what can we do to support parents who are being threatened by some sort of adversity, whether it's a natural disaster or some sort of economic adversity? Another type of situation comes that we've talked before, when we have variables like this, cognitive skills, that generally predict good outcomes in children, like good outcomes at school. And in this situation, if we have this model, what we might try to do is improve these cognitive skills. And in the example I'm going to share with you, this is one of the strategies that we use. If we can improve this, the skills here, then that would have an impact on the achievement of a child. We've also talked about moderator models in this class. And in a moderator model, like this one, the moderator doesn't directly affect the good outcome, but instead it reduces the impact of the risk factor or the adversity. And we could think of intervention as a moderator. When you intervene to try to protect a child from adversity, you are trying to be a moderator. You're trying to reduce the impact of adversity or risk factor on the, a child's life. Alternatively, we can try to change the moderator. Let's say there's a moderator in a child's life like good thinking skills, or parenting, or their personality, and we may try to shift their, their functioning on that moderator so that it helps them more when they're experiencing adversity. It, we also talked when we talked about these models, about risk activated or threat activated protective factors in the lives of children. And in these situations the adversity itself triggers the moderator. So, the classic example is an airbag in an automobile, where if the car senses that there's an accident happening the airbags go off and the airbags protect you so that you aren't harmed as much by, and get, don't get injured as much by the accident. And there are examples like that in interventions with children. One example is emergency services when something terrible happens we can intervene to help out a child or a family. And if we find out, for example, if a child is being abused or neglected we can send social services there to help the child or the family to prevent any further harm from happening to the child. In disaster response, many of our emergency ser, services are triggered by the upcoming hurricane or, or earthquake, whatever it is. And then those are sent to the area where we're trying to prepare, to respond. And that kind of emergency services can make a big difference. We also can try to boost the way these threat activated protective systems are working. For example, all of us have immune systems that are helping us fight off infections all the time, but if we know that a particular disease, some virus, is spreading around the world, we can have people vaccinated. Especially for that virus, to try to protect them from that particular threat. Maybe a flu pandemic, it may be in an Ebola situation, but we try to boost up the immune functioning of the individual to protect the individual and the population. Another example we're going to see when we take a look at the literature on children in war, as well as disaster, is that we can prepare people for disasters. We can try to strengthen these protective systems so that when a threat comes the child, the family, the school, or the community is better prepared to respond effectively to the threat and protect the individual or people involved. And this is sometimes called stress inoculation training. And we do this in many different ways. We prepare children to go to the hospital. We can prepare school communities to know what to do in the case of a tornado threat, or a school shooter type of threat. Or a war at, what to do if a war breaks out. So we'll see a lot more examples of that as we move over the next couple of modules in to the research on children in disasters and war. But there's one last segment before we leave the week. And it's an example of an intervention. And all through the week, I've been focusing on interventions and themes related to children who are experiencing homelessness and high mobility, which is a very threatening situation for a lot of children. So, my example is going to be about an intervention that we're developing to help these children succeed at school. [SOUND]
