The relationship between services and resilience: a study of Sesotho–Speaking Youths

Abstract

Serious concerns are being raised about the well-being of South Africa's young people. This article uses the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure to examine the relationship between services and resilience through a quantitative cross-sectional study of 1,209 Sesotho-speaking adolescents. The results indicate that no positive correlations exist between resilience and service use, but there are significant negative correlations between resilience and participants who had been in foster homes, questioned by the police, in jail, on probation, or had made use of substance abuse or addiction services. Strong correlations exist between service use satisfaction and resilience. We conclude that young people's satisfaction with the services used and not the mere fact of service use might support resilience. This has implications for social workers, including the need to nurture youth agency and healthy practitioner-youth bonds, and to shape communities towards providing constructive contexts where mandatory services are less necessary.