The Strength Landscape Project

The goal of The Strength Landscape Project is to assess and analyze the character strengths of humanitarian workers including those in the NGO and social service communities to develop resiliency based interventions to help communities deal with the effects of continuous stress. The assessment of character strengths is accomplished using the VIA Survey – a widely used and validated assessment tool. The VIA is a free online assessment tool that gives you a rank order of 24 differentiated strengths that have been cross-culturally established over time, and is currently available in 18 languages. VIA has acceptable internal consistency and test-retest correlations for all scales over a 4-month period are substantial (>.70). There is a growing body of research that indicates that character strengths predict success in challenging situations. Please take a look at the resources we provide! 

Humanitarian workers confront some of the world’s most serious problems. In recent years humanitarian work has become increasingly dangerous adding to the stress of aid workers and creating more urgency for protective, strength based interventions and resiliency-dedicated solutions (Roth, 2010). Research confirms that living in a context of prolonged and ongoing danger heightens anticipatory anxiety and diminishes human potential and resilience to threat (Eagle and Kaminer, 2013). This is especially relevant in continuously high conflict regions such as Eastern Africa. While character strength development programs in the workplace have been found to improve productivity and profitability (Peterson and Park, 2006), research is overwhelmingly based on organizations in resource rich, high-income countries. We want to widen the cultural lens to include Eastern Africa and evaluate the efficacy of an intervention using self-reflection and guided dialogue to cultivate character and increase resilience factors. 

Please help us gather this research by clicking on Informed Consent and then following the rest of the directions.