Young people living with violence and self-harm

The article is published in Psychology Research and Behavior Management (dovepress.com)  and is called: Resilience in young people living with violence and self-harm: evidence from a Norwegian national youth survey.

Findings

• resilience negatively and significantly correlates with the presence of psychological problems among young people in general. These correlations were particularly strong for the groups of young people who reported being victims of violence and who also engaged in self-harm.

  

• all the five dimensions or factors of resilience are generally lower for young people reporting victimization of violence than for those reporting no violent experiences.
• the five resilience factors had different strengths in terms of their negative correlations with the presence of psychological problems among all groups of youths, which can imply that the protective effect of resilience may be different for young people with different patterns of victimizations of violence and self-harm behaviors.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between resilience and the psychological problems of young people who reported being victims of violence and who engaged in self-harm. Huang and Mossige used data from a national survey conducted in 2007 asking young people in Norway (N=6,034; ages 18–19 years) about their experiences with violence during their childhood and during the past 12 months, and also about their mental health and experiences of self-harm.

The analyses revealed that resilience, as measured by the Resilience Scale for Adolescents, correlates significantly and negatively with psychological problems among all young people, and that this correlation is substantially stronger for those youths who reported violent experiences and those who engaged in self-harm.