Understanding Recovery Capital for Addiction Recovery in Adolescence and Young Adulthood

Recovery capital is based on an ecological model that understands a person’s addiction and recovery experience as a complex dynamic situated within a larger context. It considers both internal and external resources that an individual has, or can gain access to, through their network. Generally, it includes domains such as human, financial, social, and community recovery capital, although there are several models in use. Recent work has demonstrated that despite the growing international research, practice, and policy interest in this topic, there are many gaps to understanding recovery capital, especially among adolescents and young adults. These gaps include issues around tool development and measurement, the initiation and growth of recovery capital before, during, and after treatment, and how recovery capital development may intersect with other individual-level characteristics.  Addressing these gaps is crucial for advancing the field and improving recovery outcomes for young individuals.

Papers responsive to this research topic will focus on understanding, measuring, describing, or furthering the application of recovery capital to a diverse adolescent and young adult population. Authors that wish to submit to this research topic must clearly name the overarching recovery capital model of focus in their manuscript. Qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods papers are all welcome.

To gather further insights in the domain of recovery capital for addiction recovery in adolescence and young adulthood, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• longitudinal studies on recovery capital growth before, during, and after treatment;
• the role of social networks in building recovery capital;
• in-depth qualitative examinations of recovery capital domains
• intersection of recovery capital with individual and/or geographic characteristics
• development and validation of tools for measuring recovery capital;
• practical applications of recovery capital in treatment or recovery programs.

Keywords: recovery capital, recovery, addiction, adolescents, human capital, financial capital, social capital, community capital

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.