Article Critique: Families as Navigators and Negotiators
Submitted by: Submitted by Idaniag
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Category: Philosophy and Psychology
Date Submitted: 02/24/2014 07:23 PM
SOWK 503-Spring 2014
Assignment #1: Article Critique
Idania I. Garcia
January 25, 2014
Professor De Vida Bell
Families as Navigators and NegotiatorsIn a 2010 article, “Families as Navigators and Negotiators: Facilitating Culturally and Contextually Particular Expression of Resilience,” Ungar examines the idea of resiliency as a process family members achieve by locating resources and successfully negotiating them. Ungar illustrates that becoming resilient can look different to people from different cultures based on culturally appropriate explanations of favorable results and culturally specific techniques to attaining those results. The author points out different techniques utilized by social workers to motivate resilience within different communities on different levels of social work while working from a de-centered perspective. Ungar clearly identifies theories that indicate probable resilience, stating Rutter’s 1987 “Psychosocial resilience and safety systems,” in keeping that the methods used to reach or negotiate resources are completely reliant on culture.
Summary
Ungar (2008), defines resilience as “…both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided and experienced in culturally meaningful ways” (as cited in Ungar, 2010, p. 425). This meaning appears contrary to the thought of the “resilient child,” who overcomes hardship based on her or his personal resiliency (Walsh, 1998). This way of looking at resiliency makes it possible for each individual to have positive outcomes without focusing on a person’s characteristics. Resiliency can then be seen as a process and assessment of the resources at hand (Ungar, 2010; Walsh, 1998). Additionally, Rutter describes resiliency as a procedure, describing four safety systems related to it: minimizing the effect...
