Protective Factors and Resilience
A lens for understanding factors that buffer risk and support adaptation, including relationships, skills, identity, opportunities and supportive environments.
Youth development and public health research field
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- designing strengths-based support
- thinking beyond risk factors
- identifying conditions that make resilience more likely
Three questions it helps teams ask
- What protective relationships and opportunities already exist?
- Which risks can be reduced rather than only endured?
- How can environments become more supportive?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Protective Factors and Resilience as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- resilience should not be used to normalise adversity
- protective factors operate at individual, relational and structural levels
- avoid implying young people should simply cope better