Breaking the Chains of Intergenerational Childhood Poverty: A Narrative Retrospective Study of Resilience
Date
2024
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Abstract
The experience of poverty is well-documented, however, there is a notable gap in the existing research concerning the unique narratives of university students who have undergone experiences of poverty during childhood. These students have been successful in gaining admission into university despite facing major financial hardships stemming from their experiences of intergenerational childhood poverty. These university students identified with having experiences of childhood poverty as well as resilience, thus becoming an important and under-researched sample. This qualitative study aims to explore these students’ narratives of childhood impoverishment, with an emphasis on the identification and understanding of resilience within these experiences. This topic was investigated through the utilisation of the resilience theoretical framework. The study employed a Narrative Analysis (NA) to assess the experiential and retrospective narrative accounts of emerging adults within the university student demographic using semi-structured interviews. Three overarching themes were identified: (1) narratives within the living environment; (2) the nexus of poverty, education, and opportunity; and (3) participants’ constructions of resilience. The results illustrated that the narrative experience of childhood poverty contained great levels of experienced difficulties within the home and schooling environment, and with emotional implications of poverty resulting in difficulties with coping and social exclusion. However among this plethora of hardship, participants constructions of resilience related to motivation, strength, acceptance, adaptation, and rewriting the narrative towards positive meaning-making. Therefore this study provided further subjective insight into the topic of poverty and resilience by way of presenting the data as experienced by the research participants, as well as having made recommendations for future research.
Description
A research report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of f Master of Arts in Community-Based Counseling Psychology to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024
Keywords
Childhood, Poverty, Resilience, Narrative experiences, University students.
Citation
Besharati, Sahba. (2024). Breaking the Chains of Intergenerational Childhood Poverty: A Narrative Retrospective Study of Resilience [Master’s dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg].