'They're battle scars, I wear them well': A phenomenological exploration of young women's experiences of building resilience following adversity in adolescence

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journal of Youth Studies, 13(3), 273 - 290, 2010 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13676260903520886.This phenomenological study explored young women's accounts of building resilience following chains of adverse life experiences in adolescence. Six participants were interviewed, aged 20–25 years. Most had, or were receiving, a university education. They described their recovery from adversity as starting with certain pivotal moments, followed by both short-term and longer-term strategies. Short-term strategies tended to offer respite from distress and emotional comfort, increased clarity about their experiences and social affirmation. Recovery involved gaining new perspectives on their adverse situation and recovering a positive self-image through three longer-term strategies. These involved making visible progress in their education, rebuilding relationships with family and friends, and participating in the ‘normalizing’ activities and developmental projects of adolescence. Participants believed that they were stronger and more compassionate although positive achievements co-existed with some regrets. Most perceived the adversity as catalyzing personal growth. These accounts of resilience revealed the complex psychosocial processes and resources available to some adolescents

Galactic and Magellanic Evolution with the SKA

As we strive to understand how galaxies evolve it is crucial that we resolve physical processes and test emerging theories in nearby systems that we can observe in great detail. Our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearby Magellanic Clouds provide unique windows into the evolution of galaxies, each with its own metallicity and star formation rate. These laboratories allow us to study with more detail than anywhere else in the Universe how galaxies acquire fresh gas to fuel their continuing star formation, how they exchange gas with the surrounding intergalactic medium, and turn warm, diffuse gas into molecular clouds and ultimately stars. The $\lambda$21-cm line of atomic hydrogen (HI) is an excellent tracer of these physical processes. With the SKA we will finally have the combination of surface brightness sensitivity, point source sensitivity and angular resolution to transform our understanding of the evolution of gas in the Milky Way, all the way from the halo down to the formation of individual molecular clouds.Comment: 25 pages, from "Advancing Astrophysics with the Square Kilometre Array", to appear in Proceedings of Scienc

The 21-SPONGE HI Absorption Survey I: Techniques and Initial Results

We present methods and results from "21-cm Spectral Line Observations of Neutral Gas with the EVLA" (21-SPONGE), a large survey for Galactic neutral hydrogen (HI) absorption with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). With the upgraded capabilities of the VLA, we reach median root-mean-square (RMS) noise in optical depth of $\sigma_{\tau}=9\times 10^{-4}$ per $0.42\rm\,km\,s^{-1}$ channel for the 31 sources presented here. Upon completion, 21-SPONGE will be the largest HI absorption survey with this high sensitivity. We discuss the observations and data reduction strategies, as well as line fitting techniques. We prove that the VLA bandpass is stable enough to detect broad, shallow lines associated with warm HI, and show that bandpass observations can be combined in time to reduce spectral noise. In combination with matching HI emission profiles from the Arecibo Observatory ($\sim3.5'$ angular resolution), we estimate excitation (or spin) temperatures ($\rm T_s$) and column densities for Gaussian components fitted to sightlines along which we detect HI absorption (30/31). We measure temperatures up to $\rm T_s\sim1500\rm\,K$ for individual lines, showing that we can probe the thermally unstable interstellar medium (ISM) directly. However, we detect fewer of these thermally unstable components than expected from previous observational studies. We probe a wide range in column density between $\sim10^{16}$ and $>10^{21}\rm\,cm^{-2}$ for individual HI clouds. In addition, we reproduce the trend between cold gas fraction and average $\rm T_s$ found by synthetic observations of a hydrodynamic ISM simulation by Kim et al. (2014). Finally, we investigate methods for estimating HI $\rm T_s$ and discuss their biases.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 24 pages, 14 figure