Pathways to Resilience III: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture

Transformative, Mixed Methods Resilience Research
Speaker: Donna Mertens
Members of marginalized communities, such as deaf people and women and girls with disabilities, are seldom represented in the design of programs and research that are supposed to resolve challenges that they face. A transformative mixed methods approach to research provides one mechanism for providing an evidence-based strategy to increase the presence of members of marginalized communities in the development of solutions and the assessment of their effectiveness. Many of the challenges experienced by people in developing countries, or in developed countries by virtue of living in poverty, have solutions that are based on an understanding of culture and context that are not commonly privileged in the research world. Transformative researchers strive to understand the challenges and resilience present in marginalized communities as a way forward to determining how to bring scientific knowledge from a culturally responsive perspective into the search for solutions to such wicked problems as education, employment, food insecurity, natural disasters, clean water and sanitation.