Resourcing resilience: educational considerations for supporting well-being and preventing violent extremism amongst Finnish youth

Abstract

Resilience has been highlighted in educational policies internationally as one of the key elements that may prevent negative developmental trajectories, such as radicalization into violent extremism. To examine the factors that contribute to resilience at adolescence and to understand how resilience relates to wellbeing this study investigates the resilience resources of Finnish youth (n=2837). Furthermore, we examined the relationship between resilience and the youth’s self-reported levels of empathy and beneficence (pro-social orientation), life satisfaction and meaning in life (contentment with life), and their intention for non-violent action (activism), and intention for violent actions (radicalism). The results of the latent profile analysis suggest that high resilience resources are related to higher levels of pro-social orientation and contentment with life, while the opposite is true for low resilience resources. However, the findings do not indicate any significant connection between low resilience resources and an increased intent for activism or radicalism.

Keywords

• resilience
• well-being
• life satisfaction
• violence
• education
• prevention programmes