This Web site is a component of the SAMHSA Health Information Network

This Site Mental Health at HHS All Mental Health

Publications Related Links Resources Youth Violence Homepage  CMHS Programs:   Go to... Children's Campaign Community Support Emergency Services Financing HIV/AIDS Homelessness Managing Anxiety Mental Health Statistics Protection & Advocacy Special Programs State Planning Traumatic Events Suicide Prevention Programs Homepage  CMHS Activities:   Go to... 15+ School Violence Stigma Suicide Prevention Surgeon General

printer friendly page e-mail this page bookmark this page shopping cart  current or new account

This Web site is a component of the SAMHSA Health Information Network.

Part I:
Status of Research

Defining Resilience

We all know perfectly well what resilience means until we listen to someone else try to define it.

-Dr. George Vaillant (1993)

In existing research studies, the construct "resilience" has varied meanings. In the early days of research on people who did well despite adversity, the terms "invulnerable" and "invincible" were used. However, these terms proved to be not quite accurate because, in the words of Dr. Michael Rutter, they implied an "absolute resistance to damage." Rutter went on to note:

No one has absolute resistance; rather, it is more appropriate to consider susceptibility to stress as a graded phenomenon. Some individuals are more resistant than others but every one has their limits. Secondly, the term suggests that the characteristic applies to all risk circumstances. Obviously, that is a biologically implausible suggestion. There is a range of mechanisms by which risk factors operate and it must be anticipated that the features that constitute resilience will vary according to the risk mechanism. Thirdly, the concept seems to imply that the characteristic is an intrinsic feature of the individual. That is misleading because research findings indicate that resilience may reside in the social context as much as in the individual as such. Fourthly, the term suggests that it deals with an unchanging characteristic. That, too, is wrong because there is every reason to suppose that developmental changes will influence resilience just as they influence any other characteristic" (Rutter, 1991, pp. 1-2).

Masten and Coatsworth (1998) define resilience globally as "manifested competence in the context of significant challenges to adaptation or development" (p. 206). They note that researchers must make two judgments to identify resilience:

1. there has been a significant threat to the individual. This threat is usually either high-risk status or exposure to severe adversity or trauma. These are more pathogenic when severe adversity or trauma is superimposed on a person of high-risk status.

2. the quality of adaptation or development is good. That is, the child is behaving in a competent manner.

Just what "behaving in a competent manner" means may vary from one culture to the next or from one gender to the other. For example, in her study of African American mothers and their children, Randolph (1996) found that many mothers expected their children to have self-help skills such as being able to cook or go to the store at much earlier ages than researchers generally expect. "More significantly," she says, "there was a gender difference in that girls were expected to have social self-help and personal self-help skills, feeding yourself, dressing yourself, at much earlier ages than boys" (p. 17).

Luthar (1993) suggest that the term "resilience" be used for a circumscribed construct that implies "behaviorally manifested success at negotiating salient developmental tasks, in spite of major stressors and possible underlying emotional distress" (p. 442). She cites an earlier literature review (Luthar & Zigler, 1991) and stresses that "overt social competence among high risk individuals is not necessarily paralleled by superior adjustment on covert mental health indices" (p. 441). In her own research (Luthar (1991), she found that highly stressed but overtly socially competent adolescents reported increased levels of depression, anxiety, and self-criticism, much more so than competent children from low-stress backgrounds. Similarly, in their 10-year study of children of parents with affective disorders, Radke-Yarrow and Brown (1993) found somatic symptoms in 56% of the resilient children, compared to 21% of the control children. Vaillant (1993) poses the question this way:

Does resilience merely mean survival in the face of vulnerability and multiple risk factors, or should we think of resilience only when it also permits happiness? Is it enough that the vulnerable patient survives the operation and that the orphan survives theconcentration camp, or, in addition, should they be able to run and laugh and feel joy as well? (p. 285)

Wolff (1995) expresses concern about those definitions of resilience that stress only behavioral success and that sometimes call depression and anxiety "the price of resilience." While stating that "behavioural deviance and educational problems have more ominous consequences than inner suffering," she points out that "internalising difficulties and depression - more common in girls and later in life - can also make for profound interpersonal difficulties, especially in marriage and child rearing .... We need to judge resilience in terms both of externalising and internalising difficulties" (p. 566).

Foster (1997) distinguishes among coping, adaptation, and resilience. He sees coping as "a complex response to a stressful or challenging situation that is often defensive in character." Adaptation, he says, is a somewhat broader term which "moves beyond defensive or protective responses to ones that deal with improving or maximizing environmental fit." He reserves resilience for "positive changes in maintaining active or latent coping and adaptation capacities through various mechanisms (such as healing, restitution, refinement, and enhancement) that may not be immediately apparent but become evident over time" (p. 190). The latter point is very important because it stresses the necessity of carefully considering the time at which we measure resilience, and of the necessity of remembering that one's resilience may change over time and in different domains.

In a highly influential article written in 1987, Rutter insists that "resilience cannot be seen as a fixed attribute of the individual....If circumstances change, resilience alters" (p. 317). He proceeds to discuss the social and intrapsychic processes that interact in a manner that enables people to overcome adversity and set their life trajectory on a positive course. Increasingly, researchers follow Rutter's lead and stress the dynamic quality of resilience, but they do not necessarily address the mental health question. Dyer and McGuinness (1996), for example, see resilience as a global term describing a dynamic process, highly influenced by protective factors, whereby people bounce back from adversity and go on with their lives. They define "protective factors" as "specific competencies that are necessary for the process of resilience to occur," and "competencies" as "the healthy skills and abilities that the individual can access" (p. 277).

Not only is there lack of consensus about the global definition of resilience (especially with regard to the issue of one's mental health/internal world), but operational definitions of the term understandably vary from one study to another according to the specific factors being investigated. This is essential for manageable research projects, but it makes it difficult to compare findings from different studies. Yet another complicating factor is that both global and operational definitions of the term differ among and within different domains of resilience. For example, several researchers focus mainly on the domain of Educational Resilience, one global definition of which is "the heightened likelihood of success in school and other life accomplishments despite environmental adversities brought about by early traits, conditions, and experiences" (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1994). But within this domain, there are several different ways to operationalize the term , ranging from grades and standardized test scores in mathematics to overall grade point averages (GPAs).

In order to move the field along, researchers very much need some consensus on matters of definition. Perhaps there should be (1) a generally agreed upon "macro" global definition of resilience, plus a "macro" operational definition of the term; and (2) a global definition of the term within each domain, which would guide researchers as they develop the operational definition for their specific projects. This would enable us to compare different studies more readily, and it is absolutely critical if we are to compare different interventions designed to promote the development of resilience or to compare the effectiveness of a single intervention in different settings and with different populations.

One promising approach to global and operational definitions of resilience is the Ego-Resiliency (ER) construct as defined by Drs. Jack and Jeanne Block. In the early 1950s, as doctoral students at Stanford University, the Blocks empirically derived five personality types as they analyzed personality continuity and change among 84 men in the Berkeley Guidance and Oakland Growth Studies (J. Block, 1950; J.H. Block, 1951). The types they described are:

• Ego Resilients: well-adjusted and interpersonally effective
• Unsettled Undercontrollers: highly impulsive and antisocial
• Vulnerable Overcontrollers: rigidly overcontrolled and maladjusted
• Belated Adjusters: maladjusted during adolescence but functioning effectively by adulthood
• Anomic Extraverts -- well adjusted in adolescence but maladjusted in adulthood

Two of the core constructs in the Blocks' theory are ego-resiliency and ego-control, "dynamic individual-difference variables that organize and shape behavior across time and contexts" (Robbins et al, 1996, p. 4). For our purposes, the more important of these is ego-resiliency (ER), which the Blocks define as:

resourceful adaptation to changing circumstances and environmental contingencies, analysis of the "goodness of fit" between situational demands and behavioral possibility, and flexible invocation of the available repertoire of problem-solving strategies (problem-solving being defined to include the social and personal domains as well as the cognitive) (J.H. Block & J. Block, 1980, p. 48).

The typical ER adolescent, Block (1971) says, "evidences an ego structure already well-formed but by no means foreclosed from new experiences and new values. He avoids the rashness of undercontrol without assuming the constriction of overcontrol, he has inner direction and an acceptance of responsibility, and both respect for and respect from his parents and peers" (p.149). In a study of 300 African American and Caucasian adolescent boys, Robbins and his colleagues (1996) found that boys classified as "resilients" had an intermediate level of ego-control.

The ER construct combines several distinct personality attributes: active and meaningful engagement with the world, a positive and energetic approach to life, confidence, autonomy, competence, a sense of mastery within multiple life domains, perceptiveness, insight, the capacity for warm and open relationships, good interpersonal skills, and social poise. Moreover, various studies have found that ER relates to secure attachment and personality consistency over time and to moderate delay of gratification (Klohnen, 1996). One study found that ER at age 7 predicted friendship understanding and moral judgment at age 19 (Hart et al., 1998).

Klohnen (1996) elucidates how ER relates to general definitions of psychological health and adjustment. She notes that many such definitions have been advanced, and while they differ somewhat in breadth and emphasis, they all generally include the following:

1. Ability to be happy and contented with a sense of direction and purpose
2. Capacity for productive work and a sense of competence and environmental mastery
3. Emotional security, self-acceptance, self-knowledge, and a realistic and undistorted perception of oneself, others, and one's surroundings
4. Interpersonal adequacy and the capacity for warm and caring relating to others and for intimacy and respect

She notes that these general criteria resemble four components of ER:

1. Confident optimism
2. Autonomous and productive activity
3. Interpersonal insight and warmth
4. Skilled expressiveness

She notes further that the major components that she has found to define ER in adulthood are similar to those that Garmezy and Werner have shown to characterize resilient children.

ER has usually been measured using the California Adult Q-Set (CAQ), (J. Block, 1961, 1978), in which observers familiar with the subjects generate personality descriptions of the subjects via the Q-sort procedure using the set of 100 Q-sort items; ratings of multiple observers are then averaged. This time-consuming, labor intensive procedure has probably limited the use of the ER construct. Recently, however, Klohnen (1996) developed an empirically derived, 29-item self-report scale that has good internal consistency, good reliability, substantial convergent validity with the CAQ-based observer measure, and solid external criterion validity with another index of psychological adjustment. This measure may result in the ER construct's being used more frequently in the definition of resilience.

Table of Contents | Previous | Next