Fostering resilience: exploring former foster children's narratives

Children placed in foster care are the most at-risk youth group in the U.S., often experiencing negative events and outcomes before, during, and after foster care. Despite the availability of statistical data centered on (former) foster children, little is known about how these individuals make sense of their often negative and rupture-laden experiences. One way that individuals make sense of rupture in life is through narratives. Narratives are important to examine because they allow for better understanding of the experience(s) and what experiences mean to those who have lived through them. Specifically, narratives might also illuminate differences in (former) foster children's emergence from foster care as resilient, or with wellbeing intact. Thus, this study aimed to explore adult, former foster children's narrative sensemaking and whether types of stories told correlate with narrator participants' (self-reported) resilience scores. Using mixed methods, I employed narrative thematic analysis to qualitatively analyze narrative interviews, looking at how participants made sense of rupture experiences. Independent coders conducted a content analysis, coding each story as one of the four emergent types, to allow for quantitative comparisons. A Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that resilience scores differed significantly among story types. Follow-up tests determined that narrators of Thriving after Rupture, in which narrators achieved personally because of foster care-related experiences, and Transformation for Self and Others, in which narrators both achieved personally and assisted others because of past rupture experiences, displayed significantly higher resilience than did narrators of Ongoing Rupture, which framed narrators as stuck in rupture and sensemaking cycles. Narrators of Helping Others and Giving Back, who talked about assisting others in the foster care system because of their own experiences, also trended toward displaying greater resilience than Ongoing Rupture. These results indicate that framing might be as important to wellbeing as lived experiences. Thus, it is important to continue to explore narrative therapy as a means to bolster (former) foster children's resilience.