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Engaging young people in the planning of mental health promotion programmes and initiatives to meet their expressed needs continues to be a challenge for commissioners and providers. This paper reports a study to explore levels of self‐esteem and the main concerns of young people living with the legacy of conflict in the southern area of Northern Ireland, findings from which were used to inform good practice guidelines for service providers. The study highlighted that young people with low self‐esteem worry more, are more likely to engage in risk‐taking behaviour, feel more disillusioned and are less likely to access formal sources of help. Lack of trust, credibility and fears about confidentiality emerged as key barriers to help‐seeking.

Research has shown that informal carers of people living with dementia (PLWD) can be resilient in the face of caregiving challenges. However, little is known about resilience across different kinship ties. This study aims to update and build on our previous work, using an ecological resilience framework to identify and explore the factors that facilitate or hinder resilience across spousal and adult daughter carers of PLWD.

This study conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a purposive sample of 13 carers from North West England and analysed the data using a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2003).

Adult daughters were motivated to care out of reciprocity, whereas spouses were motivated to care out of marital duty. Spouses had a more positive and accepting attitude towards caregiving and were better able to maintain continuity, which facilitated their resilience.

Resilience emerged on multiple levels and depended on the type of kinship tie, which supports an ecological approach to resilience. The implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper makes a novel contribution to the literature as it uses an in-depth qualitative methodology to compare resilience across spousal and adult daughter carers of PLWD. This study adopts an ecological approach to identify not just individual-level resilience resources but also interactive community- and societal-level resources.