Images of God, Resilience and the Imaginary: A Study among Vietnamese Immigrants Who Have Experienced Loss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study examines the relationships between God image, resilience and the imaginary category in the face of loss among Vietnamese immigrants living in Canada. In earlier literature little attention was paid to the role of spiritual components in their struggle, and in their search for resources to become resilient. Furthermore, the use of Western measurements to examine the constructs of God Image, of loss, and of resilience yielded inconsistent results because of cultural differences. The current study therefore adopted Object Relations Theory, together with Durand’s Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary; these two culturally sensitive theoretical approaches suggested that higher level of Positive God Image and the synthetic category of the imaginary would be related to better health and psychological outcomes across cultures. With these two theories as ground, the central purpose of the present research is to examine the following questions: 1) Is God image associated with emotional distress? 2) Is God image related to resilience? 3) Does God image associate with the individual’s imaginary categories? 4) Is there a relationship between the imaginary categories and level of distress? To answer these research questions, a mixed method using quantitative and qualitative approaches with three phases was adopted. In the first phase, 129 participants completed five questionnaires: a demographic questionnaire, a Questionnaire on God Image (QGI), the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), the Davidson Trauma Scale (DTS), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). In the second phase, 32 willing participants out of this 129 took the AT.9 test (an archetypal test with nine elements). In this test, participants are asked to draw, using nine symbolic elements, and then write a story based on their drawing. In the last phase, a phenomenological approach was used to conduct a qualitative interview with eight persons. Results showed that a positive perception of God negatively correlated with somatization, anxiety and hostility; a positive God image was positively associated with resilience, whereas negative God image was significantly related to high levels of emotional distress. Results also showed that the synthetic categories of the imaginary were associated with a positive perception of God; and were negatively associated with somatization, intrusion and hyper-vigilance. The study suggested that the Vietnamese immigrants whose God Images reflected love, comfort, protection, and trust had higher scores on resilience, and lower scores on somatization, anxiety and hostility. The participants’ drawings and their storytelling in the AT.9 and the qualitative interview provided a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between God image and resilience in the face of adversity among Vietnamese immigrants living in Canada. The discussions on the main findings with a special focus on cultural gaps will address various implications for theory, research and clinical practice along with recommendations for future research in the field of Counselling and Spirituality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".