A DYNAMIC AND GENDER SENSITIVE UNDERSTANDING OF ADOLESCENTS’ PERSONAL AND SCHOOL RESILIENCE CHARACTERISTICS DESPITE FAMILY VIOLENCE: THE PREDICTIVE POWER OF THE FAMILY VIOLENCE BURDEN LEVEL
Abstract
In this cross-sectional study on family violence and resilience in a sample of 5,149 middle-school students with a mean age of 14.5 years from four European Union countries (Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain), we worked from the premise that resilience should not be conceptualized as a dichotomous variable. We therefore examined the gender-specific personal and social characteristics of resilience at the three levels “resilient”, “near-resilient”, and “non-resilient”. We also expanded our definition of resilience to include the absence of both externalized and internalized problem behaviours in adolescents who have been exposed to violence in their families. Using multinomial logistic regression we found reliable gender differences in the protective and risk factors between the three resilience levels. We also found that the achieved reliability of our resilience classifications is very high. Our findings suggest that adolescents’ positive adjustment despite family violence is affected only in small part by school characteristics. The co-morbidity of social risks in the family and individual factors explains a much larger part of the variance in the analysis. From a content perspective this means that an individual’s “resilience status” can be influenced in a focused way by moderating the living environment. These results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for policy.
Downloads
Metrics
Copyright (c) 2015 Wassilis Kassis, Sibylle Artz, Stephanie Moldenhauer, István Géczy, and Katherine Rossiter

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors contributing to the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Rights Granted After Publication
After publication, authors may reuse portions or the full article without obtaining formal permission for inclusion within their thesis or dissertation.
Permission for these reuses is granted on the following conditions:
- that full acknowledgement is made of the original publication stating the specific material reused [pages, figure numbers, etc.], [Title] by/edited by [Author/editor], [year of publication], reproduced by permission of International Journal of Child, Youth & Family Studies [link to IJCYFS website];
- In the case of joint-authored works, it is the responsibility of the author to obtain permission from co-authors for the work to be reuse/republished;
- that reuse on personal websites and institutional or subject-based repositories includes a link to the work as published in the International Journal of Child, Youth & Family Studies; and that the material is not distributed under any kind of Open Access style licences (e.g. Creative Commons) which may affect the Licence between the author and IJCYFS.