Resiliency Paradigm Validates Craft Knowledge
By Bonnie Benard

EDITOR'S NOTE: In this column, Bonnie Benard addresses a number of the concerns raised by the Social Development Research Group (SDRG) as expressed by J. David Hawkins. The Western Center News welcomes any additional perspectives from readers. If you wish to join the dialog, please send your comments to Editor, Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 101 SW. Main Street, Suite 500, Portland, Oregon 97204.

I want to thank the Social Development Research Group for responding to my column of last March and for bringing up several issues that need to be addressed if we are to pursue the most effective strategies and approaches for preventing the development of not only alcohol and other drug abuse but of the interrelated problem behaviors of teen pregnancy, delinquency and gang violence, and school failure. I'll respond to each of the issues raised by the SDRG and then add some of my own.

First, can protective factors exist without risk factors? "Risk and resiliency/protection are two sides of a coin and cannot exist individually," the SDRG states. As I discussed in my document, Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community, protective-factor research grew out of research focused on youth with multiple risks in their lives. However, according to Michael Rutter, the premier researcher of this question, while protective processes often mediate and buffer, they also can operate independently of risk (1987). In fact, Rutter poses this very question, "Were these not opposite sides of the same coin?" and answers that, "If the concept of protective mechanisms is to have any separate meaning it must be more than that." In concluding his discussion of this issue, Rutter states: "Protective processes is the term used here when the focus is on factors that counter risk, when the process involves a change of life trajectory from risk to adaptation, and when the mechanisms of protection seem to differ from those of vulnerability."

In many ways, this issue is not of real relevance to prevention practitioners. While, as Rutter states, "Protective mechanisms are more necessary in high-risk groups," we have all experienced risks and stressful life events, and we all require protective mechanisms "at some times and in some situations more than others" throughout our life span. When we have successfully negotiated a risk or stressful life event, we have built our resilience. Given the dynamic nature of resiliency, we have all moved in and out of resiliency. This is the nature of human development. Yet, it is just this developmental perspective that the SDRG's risk-focused approach appears to ignore. If, as Emmy Werner and Michael Rutter both state, the development of resiliency is a long-term developmental process and the human organism "this means each and every infant, child, youth, and adult" is a "self-righting mechanism," protective processes are clearly those that promote successful, healthy development throughout the life span (Werner and Smith, 1992; Rutter,1984). To say, as the SDRG does, that, "In the absence of risk for alcohol or other drug abuse, there is no need for protective factors or processes to prevent abuse," is to ignore decades of research in developmental psychology and developmental psycho pathology. This is tantamount to saying that all kids do not require the fulfilling of their basic human developmental needs for caring and support, positive expectations and regard, and active participation in their community" which, not coincidentally, are also the major categories of protective processes! Are risk and protective factors mutually incompatible paradigms for change? I have never "asserted that the concepts of risk and protective factors are somehow incompatible" "they are part and parcel of human experience. I did state, "While several approaches to prevention programming try to combine a risk and protective factor approach, I believe that these are two incompatible paradigms for change." The issue here is change strategy. I will briefly reiterate my rationale for using a protective-factor as opposed to a risk-factor approach to initiating family, school, or community-based change efforts.

First of all, a knowledge base founded on risk does not inform us as to what does work. As Norman Garmezy has stated, a focus on risks and problems has "provided us with a false sense of security in erecting prevention models that are founded more on values than facts" (in Werner, 1989, p. xix). We are not "in denial," as the SDRG suggests, about the risks in youths' lives; the knowledge of risk factors gives us, as another researcher has stated, "a context for understanding kids' lives." However, it does not tell us what to do to improve their lives. It begs the big question, "So what?" My colleagues and I have found that when we ask the participants at our workshops to identify what they see as problems in kids' lives that often lead to behaviors such as dropping out, substance abuse, and gang involvement, even though a majority often have never heard of the concept "risk factor," they can generate a list that has all 16+! Practitioners are keenly aware of what's going on with their kids. They don't want to hear about problems and risks; they want solutions and protections.

A second rationale speaks to the issue of labeling youth, families, and communities according to their risks. For whatever reasons, risk factors usually get translated by practitioners and policymakers into programs for "at-risk" and "high-risk" youth and families. According to the SDRG, this labeling and targeting is necessary to get services where they are needed the most. They state, "Knowledge of the degree of risk exposure of a population, group, or individual facilitates the allocation of prevention resources where they have the most potential to make a difference." I wholeheartedly agree that we should allocate resources to populations experiencing the multiple risks associated with poverty. As I stated previously, "According to most researchers, the greatest protection we could give children is ensuring them and their families access to the basic necessities...for healthy human development: health care, child care, housing, education, job training, employment, and recreation" (1991). We do not need to "identify risks" in order to make these basic necessities of life available to all children and families in this country. And it certainly does not take any more research to identify populations and communities that lack these resources. What research does not support are prevention strategies that label and target individuals, families, and communities for remediation based on their identified risks. As I stated in my March column, "Labeling is noticeably absent from most lists of risk factors," including that of the SDRG. This appears an amazing oversight given the enormous body of research documenting the negative effects of programs that label, track, and, thus, stigmatize youth and families and further compound the risks in their lives. Why should we waste valuable prevention resources exploring the problem and perhaps through our activities of identifying, labeling, and targeting individuals, further exacerbating the problem, when we have a solid and growing research base founded on solution, on success, on health, on positive youth development, on individuals who have "overcome the odds" and surmounted the risks in their lives?

A third rationale, which alone validates using a knowledge base of protective factors and not of risk for creating change, is that protective factors are more predictive and more powerful than risk factors. According to Emmy Werner, "Even among children exposed to potent risk factors, it is unusual for more than half to develop serious disabilities or persistent disorders" (1990). She states that, "Our findings and those by other American and European investigators with a life-span perspective suggest that these buffers make a more profound impact on the life course of children who grow up under adverse conditions than do specific risk factors or stressful life events. They appear to transcend ethnic, social class, geographical, and historical boundaries" (Werner and Smith, 1992).

A fourth rationale is that grounding our prevention efforts on protective factors gives practitioners a sense of hope and optimism. Emmy Werner states: "[Protective factors] offer us a more optimistic outlook than the perspective that can be gleaned from the literature on the negative consequences of prenatal trauma, care giving deficits, and chronic poverty. They provide us with a corrective lens" an awareness of the self-righting tendencies that move children toward normal adult development under all but the most persistent adverse circumstances" (1992). Interventions based on risks are ignoring there search on change that has identified the attitude of the change agent as the pivotal variable in change efforts. Bill Carmack, a long time community developer and professor of communications at the University of Oklahoma, states that 85 percent of all successful change is due to the attitude of the change agent, an attitude that expresses caring, exhibits positive expectations, and encourages active participation in decision making (1990). How are we to encourage the development of a sense of a bright future, a major trait of resilient children, when we look at a youth and see "alienation and rebelliousness," "family conflict," and other risk factors?

Not surprisingly, Werner and Smith begin their latest book with a line from an Emily Dickinson poem: "I dwell in possibility. It is just this attitude of possibility" read "positive expectations" that not only promotes positive intervention outcomes but also prevents burnout. It is an attitude that speaks to the strengths and engages the "self-righting mechanism," the natural resiliency, inherent in every person. I maintain that a risk-focused approach discourages the development of this attitude of possibility in practitioners by bogging them down in problems and deficits instead of focusing their energy on solutions and strengths. Furthermore, much research in motivational psychology supports the view that intrinsic motivation to learn and to change is facilitated by a relationship between learner and facilitator of learning that fosters these same three basic human needs for caring, respect, and participation. "People are engaged and motivated in domains where their basic psychological needs can be and periodically are fulfilled" (Ryan and Powelson, 1991). Protective factor research repeatedly has identified the power of a caring relationship with a teacher, youth worker, etc., that is based on mutual respect and participation to change a life trajectory from risk to resilience (Benard, 1991).

The SDRG states that my "suggestion that we ignore risk factors and focus only on protective factors is like encouraging smokers to exercise without attending to their smoking. " I confess I am suggesting this very strategy because it addresses human motivation. It is through finding a positive alternative" one that becomes more rewarding than the negative behavior that we create the "cognitive dissonance" necessary to change our behavior ( Jessor, 1984). Likewise, when our human needs are met through caring, mutually respectful, participatory relationships in our families, schools, and communities, we become bonded to these institutions, as the SDRG group has so well articulated in their theory of social development, and we are less likely to engage in health-compromising and socially irresponsible behaviors. I see two other issues the SDRG's letter raises that are critical to the prevention field. First, the field of prevention, to live up to its name, has to be about systemic change that promotes positive development for all kids. Therefore, prevention must address root causes for the development of problem behaviors, not just the symptoms, as several of the SDRG's identified risk factors are. Several researchers, including William Julius Wilson, James Coleman, and James Comer, see the social, economic, and technological changes since the late 1940s as having fragmented community life, resulting in breaks in the naturally occurring networks and linkages among individuals, families, schools, and other social systems that traditionally have provided the protection necessary for healthy human development (1987; 1987; 1992). We must be about building community in all our prevention and intervention efforts. As Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, states: It really takes a community to raise children, no matter how much money one has. Nobody can do it well alone. And it's the bedrock security of community that we and our children need (1991). It is this very sense of community that welcomes and includes all youth no matter what their risks, their special needs and challenges, their cultures, their gender. Perhaps we should have as a goal in all our prevention efforts the vision John Dewey expressed for schools: School is a home, a complete community, an embryonic democracy. The second issue of import for the prevention field is the tension that often exists between the world of prevention research and that of prevention practice. The SDRG's response to my call for redirecting the prevention field to a new paradigm for research and practice founded on protective-factor research and positive youth development reflects the contrast between the mission and values of the research community and those of the practitioner community both policymakers and direct service providers. Researchers are usually more concerned with seeking understanding than with taking action and making change. In contrast, practitioners, by definition, have to take action and make change often without any clear, rational understanding, often following their intuition and common sense. As I have stated in other articles, the SDRG's research has greatly contributed to the prevention field's understanding and awareness of the multiple risk factors associated with the development of adolescent substance abuse and delinquency. However, now that we also have a large body of research that provides us with understanding and awareness of what has helped youth overcome these multiple risks, it is time for research to move beyond a focus on understanding to an examination and evaluation of the efforts of practitioners who are seeking to create environments rich in protection for kids and families. If research is to successfully inform practice, it must be useful and useable to practitioners and validate their innate wisdom and common sense. Research findings are more likely to be used when they are not counter-intuitive [i.e., when they do not conflict with `craft wisdom'] and when their action implications are clear (Nelson, 1987). In the words of Alfred North Whitehead: Science is rooted in...common sense thought. That is the datum from which it starts, and to which it must recur....You [as researcher] may polish up common sense, you may contradict it in detail, and you may surprise it. But ultimately your task is to satisfy it (quoted by Martin Seligman, 1991).

Herein lies the fundamental power of a resiliency-focused paradigm for prevention practice: It validates practitioners' craft knowledge and common sense and their hearts. It answers for them the big question, So what? My colleagues and I have heard from hundreds of teachers and youth workers who have expressed their appreciation for our work in promoting protective-factor research and a resiliency approach because it validates what they do and energizes them to do it. I'll conclude with a statement from one note we received: I tried to imagine how it would be if I did not know about resiliency when I am working with the kids at school. I would feel totally defeated in some cases because there is no way I can remove the risk situations they have to deal with. Resiliency is my only hope.

References

Benard, B. (1991). Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community. Portland, OR: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.

Carmack, W. (1990, May). Speech delivered at the annual conference of the Illinois Department of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse, Chicago.

Coleman, J. (1987, August/September). Families and schools. Educational Researcher 16 (6), 32-38.

Comer, J. (1992). A Matter of Time: Risk and Opportunity in the Non-school Hours. New York: Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

Edelman, M.W. (1991, May/June). Mother Jones.

Garmezy, N. (1991, March/April). Resiliency and vulnerability to adverse developmental outcomes associated with poverty. American Behavioral Scientist, 34 (4), 416-430.

Jessor, R. (1984, November).Adolescent Problem Drinking: Psycho social Aspects and Development Outcomes. Paper presented at Carnegie Conference on Unhealthful Risk-Taking Behavior Among Adolescents. Stanford, CA.

Nelson, C. et al. (1987, July/August). The utilization of social science information by policymakers. American Behavioral Scientist, 30 (6), 569-577.

Rutter, M. (1987, July). Psycho social resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57 (3), 316-331.

Rutter, M. (1984, March). Interview: resilient children. Psychology Today.

Ryan, R., and Powelson, C. (1991, Fall). Autonomy and relatedness as fundamental to motivation and education. Journal of Experimental Education, 60 (1), 49-66.

Seligman, M. (1991). Learned Optimism. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Werner, E. (1990). Protective factors and individual resilience. In S. Meisels and J.

Shonkoff (Eds.). Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Werner, E., and Smith, R. (1992). Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Werner, E., and Smith, R. (1989). Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study

of Resilient Children and Youth. 1st edition, 1982). New York: Adams, Bannister, and Cox.

Wilson, W.J. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.

[From Western Center News, September 1993, Vol.6,No.4]