Spiritual Health and the Well-Being of Urban Young People

More documents

Recommendations

Info

BackgroundThe Commission on Urban Life and FaithThe Commission on Urban Life and Faith, was set up in light of the twentieth anniversary of‘Faith in the City’ – which was a ground breaking report when it was published (Commission onUrban Priority Areas, 1985).The Commission has been tasked to re-visit some of the issues that were at the heart of ‘Faithin the City’. The situation in cities and urban estates has changed considerably and so too hasthe response of churches. The Commission aims to ‘promote a vision of urban life whichanalyses and addresses the realities of its delights, injustices and its needs’.The Archbishops of the Church of England asked the Reverend Baroness Kathleen Richardsonto chair the Commission. In recognition that the urban context is diverse in culture, faith andethnicity, the Chair has drawn members of the Commission from a wide variety of backgrounds,experiences, denominations and faiths.The origins and aims of this reportThe Commission was interested to explore issues in relation to young people in urban settings.To this end, it commissioned Professor Leslie Francis at the University of Wales, Bangor – inpartnership with The Children’s Society – to produce a report on urban life and faith amongstyoung people.The key aim of the report is:To provide those who are influential in relation to the lives of young people withinformation and insights drawn from empirical theology regarding the factors thatcontribute to the spiritual health and well-being of young people in urban andglobalising contexts.The report makes use of new and previously unpublished analysis from a large national surveyundertaken with over 30,000 young people in England and Wales in the late 1990s. It alsomakes reference to recent relevant literature from the UK and other countries.The aims of the report are:1. To examine and summarise evidence on the well-being of young people in urban areas2. To explore the relationship between religious affiliation, religious belief and prayer onthe one hand; and urban young people’s sense of purpose and well-being on the other.Information sourcesThe primary information source for the report was a survey of young people. All told 163schools across England and Wales agreed to invite their year nine and year ten pupils tocomplete a detailed values survey. Around 34,000 pupils accepted this invitation. The surveywas completed with assurances of anonymity and confidentiality during normal school time.Conferring was not allowed between the pupils. The schools represented the national mixbetween the independent and state-maintained sectors. The appropriate balance betweenCatholic, Anglican and non-denominational schools was included within the state-maintainedsector.The work for the report also involved a literature review covering academic, governmental andother sources from the UK and overseas. Searches were carried out using academic journaldatabases, governmental sites, and internet search engines. The aims of this review were twofold:1. to identify relevant statistical data on the lives of urban young people in the UK2. to identify relevant conceptual literature regarding the well-being of young people.The range of literature falling into these categories is potentially vast and the report makes noclaims to comprehensive or complete coverage of these topics.2
Contemporary approaches to measuring quality of life and well-beingThere is a huge range of contemporary responses to the question of what constitutes well-beingor ‘quality of life’ for children. Our literature search has indicated that a comprehensive reviewof these approaches would require a substantial report in its own right. We restrict ourselveshere to identifying a few of the most prominent approaches which have recently been developedin the UK and in other countries, before going on to describe the approach which we havechosen to utilise for this report.One major relevant strand has been the development of the concept of ‘resilience’. Resiliencedoes not directly refer to quality of life, but rather to the factors which predispose people to have‘positive outcomes’ even in the face of adversity. According to O’Donnell et al (2002) resiliencein relation to children and young people was first conceptualised by Werner (1984) who definedit as:the ability to cope effectively with stress and to exhibit an unusual degree ofpsychological strength for one’s age and set of circumstances (O’Donnell et al, 2002:1266)The concept has been used to explore people’s resilience to a range of adverse events andcircumstances. For example, Rutter (1985) looked at factors which protected againstpsychiatric disorder; Mrazek & Mrazek (1987) looked at resilience in child maltreatment victims;O’Donnell et al (2002) explored resilience in urban children exposed to community violence; andFlynn et al (2003) look at resilience amongst young people in care. Research into resiliencehas identified a wide range of protective factors in relation to children, their family, in theirinterpersonal relationships and in the community which are associated with more positiveoutcomes.A similar approach to identifying protective and risk factors has been taken by the Communitiesthat Care initiative which originated in the US and has recently been adapted and utilised in theUK (Beinart et al, 2002). This model looks at 17 risk factors in the family, at school, in thecommunity and in peer relationships; and six protective factors. The theory underpinning themodel:sees the development of pro-social factors as a means of protecting children from theconsequences of risk factors. Protective factors are seen as more cross-cutting andcontribute to reducing risk in all areas. (Crow et al, 2004: 3)A different perspective is offered by the New Economics Foundation’s approach to measuringthe well-being of young people. A pilot study conducted in Nottingham (New EconomicsFoundation, 2004) focused on two aspects of well-being – life satisfaction and personaldevelopment:‘Personal development means being curious, and engaging in challenging andabsorbing activities. Whilst most studies have only focused on life satisfaction, otherresearch has shown that the second dimension of well-being, personal development, isimportant for people’s overall ability to cope well with life’s challenges ..’ (NewEconomics Foundation, 2004: 2)Key findings from this pilot study were that well-being fell as children got older, and that asmany as a third (32%) of the young people surveyed were ‘at the very least unhappy in life andmay be at risk of mental health problems’ (New Economics Foundation, 2004: 2).Save the Children Fund have launched a regular publication which provides an independentsummary of information on the well-being of children in the UK. So far, two editions have beenproduced (Bradshaw, 2002; Bradshaw, 2005) focusing on a range of aspects of children’s livesincluding poverty; mental health; physical health; and time and space.The Government has also recently focused increasing attention on the dimensions of positiveoutcomes for children and young people. As part of the ongoing work within the Every ChildMatters agenda, a common outcomes framework has been developed (HM Government, 2004)which consists of five broad outcomes for children: ‘be healthy’, ‘stay safe’, ‘enjoy and achieve’,‘make a positive contribution’, and ‘achieve economic well-being’. Each outcome has a set ofassociated aims. For example the five aims which contribute to the ‘be healthy’ outcome are:physically healthy; mentally and emotionally healthy; sexually healthy; healthy lifestyles; choose3
Page 7: 1IntroductionThis report has been c
Page 14 and 15: 2Research findingsIn this central c
Page 16 and 17: Table 3: Environmental domain: Over
Page 18 and 19: However, there were more substantia
Page 20 and 21: also see minority ethnic communitie
Page 22 and 23: Figure 3: Factors associated with f
Page 24 and 25: There were no differences on this i
Page 26 and 27: To summarise the findings here:•
Page 28 and 29: complex and detailed set of finding
Page 30 and 31: • Religion, however, does offer s
Page 32 and 33: not covered by topics in the survey
Page 34 and 35: Measuring the well-being of young p
Page 36 and 37: Federal Interagency Forum on Child
Page 38: Annex: RecommendationsOn the basis

Spiritual Health and the Well-Being of Urban Young People

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?