Resilience in the Margins: An In-Depth Qualitative Case Study of a Filipino Youth Navigating Family Separation and Economic Hardship

Abstract

This intrinsic qualitative case study looks at how resilience is created by the environment and limited by structure in the life of a rural Filipino teen who has to deal with a long-term father absence and unstable finances while still going to school. In a bioecological and socioecological framework, resilience is seen not as a personal trait but as an adaptive process that happens at the system level when family changes, school environments, and larger structural inequalities combine in new and changing ways. Three in-depth semi-structured interviews, non-participant classroom observations, and document analysis were used over the course of one academic month to collect data, which was then analyzed using reflexive theme analysis. Aspirational schooling under material constraint, negotiated role compression between labor and learning, relational buffering within informal school ecologies, and temporally structured hope as regulatory projection were the five processes that were found to work together. The ability to adapt was spread across institutional and relational systems, and it was mediated by culturally embedded moral duty. In this case, responsibility was seen as limited agency rather than unhealthy role reversal. Educational ambition worked as a relationally grounded mobility project, and focusing on the future kept people going even when things got tough. To emphasize that endurance does not mean that a system is adequate, resilience coexisted with fatigue and structural injustice. The study adds to socioecological resilience theory by focusing on moral economy as a way to help people who are structurally limited in their ability to act in a rural area of the Global South. It also shows how this theory can be used to improve multisystemic educational change and relationally responsive schooling.