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Resilience as bouncing back

The purpose of this article is to clarity the study of resilience by presenting a scale for assessing the orignial and most basic meaning of the word resilience.  The root for the Enligsh word "resilience" is the word "resile," which means "to bounce or spring back" (from re- "back" + salire- "to jump, leap"; Agnes, 2005). While recognizing that words evolve in meaning over time, the ability to bounce back or recover from stress may be important to assess and study in its own right.

The Brief Resilience Scale

1. I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times

2. I have a hard time making it through stressful events (R)

3. It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event

4. It is hard for me to snap back when something bad happens (R)

5. I usually come through difficult times with little trouble

6. I tend to take a long time to get over set-backs in my life (R)

1=strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neutral, 4=agree, 5=strongly agree

Smith, B. W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., & Bernard, J. (2008). The brief resilience scale: assessing the ability to bounce back. International journal of behavioral medicine, 15, 194-200.

Resilience Theory

Polidore's (2004) theory on resilience was developed using data obtained three African American female teachers who participated in a qualitative research study. (...) Polidore's resilience theory consists of eight characteristics or themes of resilience: religon, flexible locus of control, an individual's ability to view adverse situations positively or optimistic bias, autonomy, commitment, change, relationships, and education viewed as important. As corroborated by the informants in Polidore's study, these themes influenced their teaching experiences and retention in education before, during, and after desegregation in the South.

Two premises guided the framework of Polidore's study. The first premise was referred to as developmental perspective, which indicated that adults develop resilience, learn to cope, and adapt over a lifetime multiple processes that may vary over time, rather than a set of fixed traits (Walsh, 2006).

The second premise of Polidore's study was identified as ecological perspective, which consisted of the spheres of external or environmental influences of an individual, such as family, school, work settings, or larger social systems across the life span (Walsh, 2006). The constuct of this study also focused on the characteristics or themes of  resilience as identified in Polidore's theory.

The great insight of pioneering scholars of resilience in child and family studies was in recognizing the importance of understanding influences that promoted positive adaptation or mitigated the effects of risk or adversity. While acknowledging that some individuals or families appeared to be more vulnerable to adversity, they noted others who appeared to be better protected or to have recovered better than individuals or families exposed to similar trauma or family crisis. Sometimes these buffering effects reflected the positive end of a continuum (e.g., good emotion regulation or problem-solving) along a dimension already known to exacerbate risks posed by adversities such as poverty or violence in children or families (e.g., poor emotion regulation or problem-solving). In other cases, protective influences (e.g., a supportive friend or mentor) differed from vulnerabilities typically studied in earlier models of stress.

The systematic study of individual resilience emerged in clinical sciences concerned with effects of adversity on mental health and development, led by investigators in search of understanding the origins and etiology of mental health problems (Masten, 1989, 2007, 2012, 2014b).

Resilience concepts in individual and family scholarship shared some of their roots. General systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968) influenced family resilience ideas as well as individual resilience theory (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2013; Hawley & DeHaan, 1996; Masten, 2014b).

Defining Resilience: Past and Present Challenges

Theory and research on resilience in the individual and family literatures have been plagued with challenges related to varying definitions of key concepts (Hawley, 2013; Luthar, 2006; Masten, 2014b; Masten & Cicchetti, 2016). Resilience as a concept has been viewed and defined as a trait, a process, an outcome or pattern of the life course, or a broad conceptual domain that encompasses all these ideas (Luthar, 2006; Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990; Boss et al., 2017; DeHaan et al., 2013; Masten, 1999; Masten & Cicchetti, 2016; Panter-Brick & Leckman, 2013; Patterson, 2002).

For some scholars, resilience (or resiliency) was defined as a traitlike characteristic of an individual or family; others viewed resilience as the inferred capacity for adapting to adversity that derived from observable success in overcoming challenges.

> how does the inferred capacity come from?

From the latter perspective, resilience was inferred on the basis of two observable criteria: challenges (risks, stressors, or adversities) confronting a child or family and posing a significant threat to their well-being or function and positive adaptation (how well the person or family is doing by designated criteria), typically judged by indicators of good function or competence in the development of the person or family (Masten & Cicchetti, 2016).

Resilience in a Developmental Systems Framework

Both individual- and family-centered concepts of resilience have roots in systems theory as well as in models of stress and coping (Hawley & DeHaan, 1996; Henry et al., 2015; Masten & Monn, 2015; Walsh, 2016). Over the past decade, systems theory has permeated many fields of study, offering a unifying framework for integrated resilience science (Masten, 2015, 2016a). As noted earlier, global challenges involving multiple systems, such as climate change, natural disaster, war and terror, and pandemics, may have sparked this rapid transformation (Boss et al., 2017; Masten, 2014a).

Masten and Cicchetti (2016) summarized salient themes of a systems framework into eight principles. At the heart of these principles are the following core ideas:

• Many interacting systems at multiple levels shape the function and development of living systems.

• The capacity for adaptation of a system and its development are dynamic (always changing).

• Because of interconnections and interactions inherent to living systems, change can spread across domains and levels of function.

• Systems are interdependent.

These attributes of complex adaptive systems have profound implications for individual and family resilience. Individuals are embedded in families and other systems (e.g., peer groups, schools), and families in turn are embedded in other systems (e.g., cultures, communities). Interactions of individuals, families, and larger contexts affect all of the interacting systems, although some systems may have greater directional influence (e.g., parents have greater responsibility for the care of infants than infants do, although infants engage and signal parents in many ways). From a systems perspective, resilience of a system at one level will depend on the resilience of connected systems. Thus, individual resilience will depend on other systems interacting with the individual, particularly on systems that directly support that individual’s resilience, such as a parent or extended family.

>  when they are young, they tend to get influenced immensely from parents or extended families

Masten, A. S. (2018). Resilience theory and research on children and families: Past, present, and promise. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 10(1), 12-31.