Developing a Culturally Grounded Model of Psychological Resilience for Nigerian Conflict-Affected Communities: A Grounded Theory Investigation

Existing resilience frameworks in psychology are predominantly derived from Western individualistic contexts and inadequately capture the communal, spiritual, and culturally embedded protective processes that characterise resilience in Nigerian conflict-affected communities. This study develops an original, culturally grounded model of psychological resilience specific to Nigerian conflict-affected communities through a Grounded Theory methodology. Thirty-five in-depth qualitative interviews and four focus groups are conducted with adult survivors of communal conflict in Plateau State and Borno State, sampled purposively for maximum variation by conflict type, gender, and community role. Constructivist Grounded Theory procedures including open, axial, and selective coding in NVivo generate the theoretical model from participant narratives. The study employs theoretical sampling to saturation and member-checking for analytic rigour. Available resilience theory literature from sub-Saharan Africa identifies communal grieving, collective religious practice, and elder-mediated conflict resolution as resilience processes absent from dominant Western models. Ungar's Social Ecological Resilience Theory and Ubuntu philosophy of communal selfhood provide theoretical sensitising concepts. The original contribution is a Communal Resilience Pathway Model specific to Nigerian conflict-affected communities that identifies the cultural mechanisms of resilience heretofore absent from the empirical literature. Findings will generate a theoretically grounded framework directly applicable to psychosocial programme design in North Central and North East Nigerian conflict recovery contexts. Keywords: resilience, grounded theory, communal resilience, conflict-affected communities, Nigeria.