Resilience and marginalized youth: Making a case for personal and collective meaning-making as part of resilience research in public health

Abstract

The public health research community has long recognized the roles of discrimination, institutional structures, and unfair economic practices in the production and maintenance of health disparities, but it has neglected the ways in which the interpretation of these structures orients people in overcoming them and achieving positive outcomes in their lives. In this call for researchers to pay more - and more nuanced - attention to cultural context, we contend that group identity-as expressed through affiliation with an oppressed group-can itself prompt meaningful role-based action. Public health's study of resilience, then, must consider the ways that individuals understand and, in turn, resist discrimination. In this article, we briefly outline the shortcomings of current perspectives on resilience as they pertain to the study of marginalized youth and then consider the potential protection offered by ideological commitment. To ground our conceptual argument, we use examples from two different groups with whom the authors have worked for many years: indigenous and sexual minority youth. Though these groups are dissimilar in many ways, the processes related to marginalization, identity and resilience are remarkably similar. Specifically, group affiliation can provide a context to reconceptualize personal difficulty as a politicized collective struggle, and through this reading, can create a platform for ideological commitment and resistance.