Research
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Resilience

Fostering Resilience in Young People with Additional Support Needs Using a ‘Settings’ Approach

Research funded by The National Centre for Resilience (NCR).

Research Collaboration: University of Glasgow, National Centre for Resilience, The Usual Place

Published: The Journal of Intellectual Disabilities Whitelaw, S., Bell, A., Mackay, A., & Hall, H. (2024). Fostering resilience in young people with intellectual disabilities using a ‘settings’ approach. Journal of Intellectual Disabilities, 28(2), 549-566.

Executive Summary:

Purpose: People with additional support needs currently face many health challenges. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has most likely exacerbated such challenges, placing a significant amount of stress on this already socially excluded group. It is therefore vital to shed light on the nature of ‘settings’ that promote resilience and more generally, wellbeing among those with additional support needs.

Methodology/Methods: We adopted a qualitative exploratory case study approach formed around the local social enterprise community café ‘The Usual Place’ – an organisation that specifically aims at increasing the employability and wellbeing of those with additional support needs. Both internal (staff members) and external (Third sector employees/parents) stakeholders took part in the study, alongside trainees from within the organisational. Semi-structured interviews were used for data collection, after which the data was thematically analysed.

Findings: Our work shows that TUP provides an effective organisational context in which trainees can negotiate a number of different tensions that ultimately foster resilience. The organisational ethos and tenacity that TUP displayed during the pandemic in maintaining wellbeing and resilience was a particularly significant asset in the organisation. We have also started to understand how in applied ‘on-the -ground’ circumstances, practitioners successfully negotiate the constructive tension between ‘exposure’ and ‘support’ in fostering resilience. Finally, we have found that TUP showed particular organisational strength during the acute crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown, in helping trainees cope with anxiety, fear and loneliness.

Conclusion: Our research suggests that The Usual Place as a setting helps facilitate resilience amongst its trainees by providing them with a series of resources, and although some limitations surrounding generalisability and transferability are present, key insights gained from this study can be applied further throughout the Scottish context.

Building from these findings, we suggest a series of further lines of potential research:

 a more detailed examination of how TUP as a potentially ‘agile’ organisation nurture and enact such a culture,

 a more detailed examination of the specifics of this form of practice,

 an exploration of the extent to which these resources and approaches have the potential to be translated into other types of organisational settings – for example, schools, workplaces,

 and an examination of the extent to which TUP’s COVID-19 specific responses might be translated for emergency responders and other emergency responses.

Abstract

The need to foster resilience amongst young people with intellectual disabilities is increasingly recognised within policy. Critically, understanding of the actual means by which this aspiration might be most sensitively and effectively met is considered weak. This paper reports on an exploratory case-study of a social enterprise community café – The Usual Place – that through the promotion of employability, seeks to promote resilience amongst its young ‘trainees’ with intellectual disabilities. Two research questions were set: “how is ‘resilience’ conceptualized within the organisation” and “what features within the organisation are significant in fostering resilience”? We identify a range of significant features associated with being able to successfully foster resilience – the need for a foundational ‘whole organisation’(settings) approach based on high levels of participation and choice; the negotiation of a constructive dynamic tension between ‘support’ and ‘exposure’; and the embedding of these actions in embodied actions and day-to-day organisational activities.

The Journal of Intellectual Disabilities journal provides a medium for the exchange of best practice, knowledge and research between academic and professional disciplines from education, social, and health settings to bring about advancement of services for people with intellectual disabilities.

“The Journal of Intellectual Disabilities provides evidence of inter-professional scholarship in this applied area. The Journal combines a unique and eclectic blend of evidence of scholarly activity that combines practice development innovation with robust research methodology. The result is a publication that aspires successfully to provide pragmatic solutions to service change and advances in professional practice, based upon best evidence and intellectual rigour. Furthermore, the Journal continues to provide a forum that makes a significant contribution to enhancing the quality of life for people with intellectual disabilities and their supporters’. Professor David Sines, London South Bank University.

Model Transfer

The Dumfries Arts Award Project: towards building a programme theory of innovation transfer across two social organisations

Research Collaboration: University of Glasgow School of Interdiscipliniary Studies, The Usual Place, The Theatre Royal Dumfries

Published: Social Enterprise Journal: Programme theory of innovation transfer. Sandy Whitelaw, Isla Gibson, Annie Wild, Heather Hall, Heather Molloy Journal: Social Enterprise Journal Social Enterprise Journal (2021) 17 (2): 183–202. https://doi.org/10.1108/SEJ-11-2019-0081 Published: 14 January 2021

Abstract

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to critically understand a programme theory of the“transfer” of work in one social organisation and sector (an innovative and successful social enterprise community café,

The Usual Place that seeks to enhance the employability of young people with additional support needs in “hospitality”) to another (Dumfries Theatre Royal, a regional theatre and registered charity, specifically the “Dumfries Arts Award Project” and more generally,“the arts”).

Design/Methodology/Approach– By means of gaining insight into the complexity of the transfer of innovative practices between two socially oriented organisations and theoretical insights into associated conducive contexts and optimal processes, the work used realist evaluation resources within a longitudinal ethnographic approach. Within this, a series of specific methods were deployed, including semi structured key stakeholder interviews, non-participant observation and“walking” and“paired” interviews with service users in each organisation.

Findings– The principle nding is that with attention being paid to the context and intervention processes associated with transfer processes and having suf cient capacity and strong partnership working, it is possible to take an innovative idea from one context, transfer it to another setting and have relatively immediate“success” in terms of achieving a degree of sustainability. The authors propose a provisional programme theory that illuminates this transfer. They were also able to show that, whilst working with the potentially conservative concept of“employability”; both organisations were able to maintain a progressive ethos associated with social innovation.

Originality/value– The work offers theoretical and methodological originality. The significance of “scaling up” social innovation is recognised as under-researched and under-theorised and the use of a realistic evaluation approach and the associated development of provisional programme theory address this.

Keywords Social innovation, Realistic evaluation, Policy transfer and translation

Paper type Research paper