Update from Angie: The work of more resilience chums to tell you about today, Practitioner resilience, youth resilience and deep theory. What’s not to like? - 18 March 2014 Professor Debra Jackson, UTS, Sydney. I met her before going to see my friends Margaret and Pauline at Shopfront, but I’m writing about her work now in my resilience-focused blogs. She’s written zillions of publications on the support needs of disadvantaged young people and on nurse resilience, including how to support nurses to better effect. I’d come across her work previously and was very keen to chum up. The website at UTS says a key objective of her work is to enhance the well-being of vulnerable and socially marginalised groups. She’s also keen on the development of sustainable and culturally sensitive supportive interventions. Debra makes me look like a lazy time-wasting baggage who should be disciplined for under-performance right now. Still we hit it off, so we’re planning some projects that we can do together - she wants to come over to England to escape the Australian weather (yeah right!). I just want to cling on to the hem of her skirt and never let her go. New bezzy mate Debra and I are both outraged about the lack of training and support many practitioners get, especially ones who are not afforded the hallowed title ‘professional’. Also, the wider organisational context of resilience needs looking at, so often researchers just focus on the ‘internal’ resilience of individual nurses or other practitioners. How much grief should some of these people take in the workplace and why should they be resilient I’m wondering? Makes me mad. Yet another dimension of this concerns the psychodynamics of resilience. I’ve been interested in this for many a year, following on from work I did yonks ago with Marnie Freeman on something we called the ‘Effect of the Professional Ego’. The focus of this was the defensive practices of health visitors and other professionals. We really rated Menzies Lyth’s work on nurse ‘coping’ in the workplace, but that seems to have been forgotten a bit now in the debates on the neglect of patients in the current NHS. How much can practitioners take before they become as poorly as their clients, and how to support people to maintain compassion and yet not get enmeshed are other issues we dealt with in that work. Complex stuff. Download our old paper from the Getting Hold of Our Stuff page on the boingboing website if I’ve piqued your interest – (boingboing.org.uk/index.php/getting-hold-of-our-stuff) Popping over the waters (via Melbourne, but I’m hoping that Deborah Joy Warr will blog about that trip because my fingers are bleeding), I visit a group of researchers from the University of Auckland. I’m actually staying for a night in what looks like the rainforest to me, at the house of Dr Carole Adamson who is coming to do one of our resilience forums (boingboing.org.uk/index.php/resilience-forum/15-static-content/resilience-forums/148-may-14-forum) in Brighton in May. Carole’s work is on resilient practitioners too, and one of my Phd students, Caroline Hudson found a paper Carole had written that we were wanting to write ourselves – we thought we were going to be the first people to really properly include social justice issues in resilient practitioner analyses. But darn it, Carole got there first. Often the way, be careful if you think you’ve got the next big idea. Somebody the other side of the world, or down the road even, probably had the same one yesterday and has already published it in the most mind-blowingly fascinating Impact Factor Journal. So don’t get so big for your boots. Rather than silently seethe, Caroline and I decided to make Carole our friend and bleed her dry for insights. Since the most recent earthquakes in New Zealand there has been a high demand for resilient researchers to diversify into disaster studies, so Carole’s not writing so much on practitioner resilience now. But still we will bleed her dry. Have a read of Carole’s resilience blog, she’s worked really hard on it and it’s a lovely introduction to the conceptual debates: socialworkresearchnz.wordpress/2014/02/07/the-resilience-of-the-resilience-concept-do-we-mean-what-we-think-we-mean/ Carole has written one of the most fascinating papers on practitioner resilience, and is quite unusual in her inequalities focus, rather than simply focussing on internal resilience capacities of individuals. She’s got a very quirky brother and a lovely dog too (see pic below). I had a great time hanging out with them, but they weren’t so interested in us rabbiting on about concepts of resilience so we had to discuss a few other topics too, including basements and cats, goth big and small. After Carole and colleagues, another pair of resilience researchers are the objects of my desires, Prof Robyn Munford (who was also involved with supervising Carole, small world) and Dr Jackie Sanders from Massey University. I met with them at Youthline, a café run by young people and collaborators in their astonishingly impressive longitudinal research project on young people’s experiences of multiple service use. My goodness they had a data set to die for. Five hundred young people, with 100 followed up in depth, and they had worked so hard to find them all for follow ups and have written a fascinating paper on why it’s so important to follow people up if they seem difficult to find. Otherwise your data is skewed. Yeah right. Dr Becky Heaver (https://twitter/beckyheaver) and I have just written a couple of papers moaning about the fictitious samples a lot of researchers seem to have in the resilience field. They tend to stick to researching the views and experiences of people who are easy to find and have the literacy skills and attention spans to fill out loads of questionnaires. It was also great to meet some of the young people in the café and the youth organisation’s workers who had done much of the interviewing for the study. Overall, the study found that young people get most out of a single quality service (time, attitude, good advice etc.), rather than multiple visits to different service providers. So that old research finding that you really do have to be very nice as a practitioner to clients in order to be effective, is found to be the case yet again. Robyn and Jackie are seriously getting stuck into working with young people and practitioners to make their research useful for the organisation and beyond. I love those gals. There is some teaming up to be done now with them, Carole and Debra. Focusing on supporting practitioners to be kind…It’s been done to death gals, but the world still hasn’t cracked it. Was just about to sign off here, but really I should mention someone else first, another resilience chum I met up with in Melbourne. Look, I know I keep swapping from New Zealand to Oz, so sorry about that. It’s all just the other side of the world to most people reading this blog. Dr Dorothy Bottrell. Big sigh. I don’t imagine she wears skirts that much, but if she did I’d be hanging on the hem of hers too. She has written some amazing articles on resilience, and has been having a load of ideas that Boingboing community researcher Emily Gagnon and I have been having in Brighton. Here we go again…. Like us, Dorothy wants to reclaim resilience from neoliberals. If you don’t know what I’m on about, hang around in a university for a day and the word ‘neoliberal’ will trip off your tongue. Basically, we’re talking ‘Tory types’ – some of them like the word ‘resilience’ because they use it to say that poor people should get on their bikes and stop moaning. The neoliberals want to dismantle public services and get us all to support ourselves and be resilient. At the other end of the spectrum, postmodernists see resilience as an evil concept that should be buried at the stake. ‘What’s Joan of Arc got to do with this now?’ I hear you mutter. She’s got nothing to do with it. I’m just trying to stimulate your interest by mixing metaphors. No matter. Dorothy, Emily and I are on a mission. Resilience needs to be reclaimed as a concept that is useful in supporting young people, parents, practitioners and policy makers to combat inequalities, for themselves and for others. This is what Em and I are calling ‘fifth wave’ resilience, following on from Masten’s four waves. And we got there first, so push off now if you’ve thought of that term on the other side of the world, we need the idea for our REF* points. Part of the fifth wave is doing more collaborative research with young people, parents and practitioners themselves. To the barricades now Dorothy and Em. I’m right behind you, clinging on to your trouser hems. *If you don’t know what these are, don’t worry, just ask any UK academic. They will delight in telling you. And Dorothy’s just told me that she mentioned a fifth wave herself. It was about getting young people’s voices properly on the table. So we really are all in it together. xxx
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:28:49 +0000
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