An ecological investigation of resilience among rural‐urban migrant adolescents of low socioeconomic status families in China

Abstract The present study aims to explore the mechanism of resilience among rural‐urban migrant adolescents of low socioeconomic status (SES) families in China with the ecological system perspective. Selecting 946 rural‐urban migrant adolescents from the China Education Panel Survey, we used latent class analyses to distinguish different levels of resilience among migrant adolescents from low‐SES families, and logistic regressions to identify factors associated with resilience and to examine the cumulative risk and protection models. The findings show that parental expectation, teacher support and organised neighbourhood are salient resilience‐promoting factors; and resilience happens only if protective factors accumulate enough at multiple systems to compensate the negative effect of cumulative community risk. The study describes the importance of a protective environment in the domains of family, school and neighbourhood on the resilience of this group, and suggest intervention programmes should extend the paradigm from child‐centred approach to environment‐focused approach to potentiate the positive development of this population.