Thriving despite Parental Physical Abuse in Adolescence: A Two-Wave Latent Transition Analysis on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Violence-Resilience Outcome Indicators

Abstract

Internationally, about 25% of all children experience physical abuse by their parents. Despite the numerous odds against them, about 30% of adolescents who have experienced even the most serious forms of physical abuse by their parents escape the vicious family violence cycle. In this study, we analyzed longitudinally the data from a sample of N = 1767 seventh-grade high school students in Switzerland on physical abuse by their parents. We did this by conducting an online questionnaire twice within the school year. We found that in our sample, about 30% of the participating adolescents’ parents had physically abused them. We considered violence resilience a multi-systemic construct that included the absence of psychopathology on one hand and both forms of well-being (psychological and subjective) on the other. Our latent construct included both feeling good (hedonic indicators, such as high levels of self-esteem and low levels of depression/anxiety and dissociation) and doing well (eudaimonic indicators, such as high levels of self-determination and self-efficacy as well as low levels of aggression toward peers). By applying a person-oriented analytical approach via latent transition analysis with a sub-sample of students who experienced physical abuse (nw2 = 523), we identified and compared longitudinally four distinct violence-resilience patterns and their respective trajectories. By applying to the field of resilience, one of the most compelling insights of well-being research (Deci & Ryan, 2001), we identified violence resilience as a complex, multidimensional latent construct that concerns hedonic and eudaimonic well-being and is not solely based on terms of psychopathology.