Summary of article: The Construct of Resilience: A Critical evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work
The article deals with Resilience, which it defines as "a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity". The article was written due to a recent increase in interest in the field of resilience, and comes to evaluate the existing literature on the topic.
The article deals with the history of research of resilience and the 4 main categories of concerns that are raised when dealing with it:
1 – Vagueness of definitions and terminology dealing with the concept.
2 – Variations in inter-domain functioning and risk experiences in apparently resilient children
3 - Instability in the phenomenon of resilience
4 – Theoretical concerns including questions about the utility of resilience as a scientific construct
The article tries to raise the questions and possibly provide answers to the concerns in these 4 fields.
Although the studies were not officially on resilience, the original ideas of resilience came around do to schizophrenics who were able to cope in normal society. In addition, children of schizophrenic parents are used as an additional base for the study of resilience in children due to their high risk situation. Following Emily Werner's study, research on resilience expanded to children in other high risk situations such as illness, socio-economic situation, maltreatment, etc. The purpose was to find things in common with those who cope well and differentiate them from those who cope poorly so to know what effects resilience of children. Early studies thought that these strengths were in the child themselves, but later found that it is based on 3 things; 1 – the child's personal attributes, 2 – aspects of the child's family, 3 – characteristics of their wider social environment. Later research also began studying how factors effected resilience, and not just which. In addition, there was a move towards the view of resilience being a changing, flexible thing, as opposed to remaining the same for life, and so began being called resilience as opposed to invulnerability.
He article now brings a number of commonly raised problems in resilience theory:
A - Vagueness and Variations in Definitions
1 – There is little agreement in the theoretical research on definitions with substantial variations in operationalization and measurement of key constructs.
Rutter defined resilience as the positive end of the distribution of development outcomes in high risk individuals.
Masten distinguished 3 phenomena of resilience; 1 – at risk individuals show better-than-expected outcomes, 2 – positive adaptations are maintained despite the occurrence of stressful experiences, and 3 – there is good recovery from trauma.
Definitions in resilience have ranged from dealing with single occurrences to need for it to be a life long coping process, and from requiring the child to excel in all areas to excelling in one area so long as are at least average in others. There have also been differences in manners of measuring. Some measured people who the considered highly resilient to others, others have set outside criteria. This is a problem which leads to conflicting results in information, but also allows us to learn more about the field from different points of view. Despite this, there are some areas which have recurred throughout many studies. These areas include the need for supportive adults, effective schools, and connections with pro-social adults in a wider community.
Therefore, future studies must clearly define the methods they use in testing resilience, and must focus on recurring themes found in multiple studies in an attempt to form justifiable strategies of measuring resilience.
2 – Researchers use the term resilience as both a personal trait and dynamic process.
Jeanne and Jack Block developed the idea of Ego-Resiliency, which includes a set of personal traits including sturdiness of character and flexibility of functioning in response to changing environmental situations. This definition does not mean the person has gone through a situation of stress and adversity. Therefore, Ego-resilience differs from resilience in 2 ways. First that ego-resilience is a personal trait while resilience is a dynamic process; and second that ego resilience does not necessarily need adversity.
Masten recommends that the term resilience be used only in extreme cases of challenging life conditions so it doesn't become a trait either you have or you don't. Another situation where people get confused is when we say "resilient children". This does not mean that the child has a trait that makes him resilient, but that the conditions of resilience (adversity and coping) exist. In future experiments, the author recommends caution in choice of terminology.
3 – There is little consensus of wording within models of resilience (related terminology)
One example is the word "protective". Sometimes it refers to a trait that people who have are less likely to be effected by high levels of adversity. Other times it refers to "direct ameliorative effects" (no idea what this means – sorry), and in others as traits that differentiate between high functioning children at risk and those who developed serious problems.
Luthar gave terms to certain processes. All ameliorative attributes he called "protective". Within this category he split attributes into 6 categories (See Figure 1 in the article – page 547 – for the breakdown). He said that similar suffixes can be added to vulnerable as well.
B – Multidimensional Nature of Resilience
1 – The fact that some high risk children experience high competence in some areas and low in others leads to scientists to question the truthfulness of the construct of resilience.
An example of this is that in maltreated children 2/3 show resilience in academic but only 21% in social competence. They have also found that children who have suffered sever adversity and adapted well often struggle with psychological problems such as PTSD.
The author proposes that there should be similarity within connected areas, such as academic achievement and classroom behavior, but in different areas, such as social acceptance, it cannot be expected. These differences do not disprove, but rather stress the importance of specification in resilience theories. This has been becoming more popular with terminology such as "educational resilience", "emotional resilience", etc.
2 – Inclusion of diverse adaptation domains and evidence of inconsistencies complicate finding optimal indicators of resilience within individual studies.
A common way of measuring resilience is by watching a number of age-specific goals (for example, attachment to caretaker and development of autonomy in a toddler). We must check and see which run parallel to each other and which are unrelated.
Another question is if any of the indicators should be considered more important than others. If the situation causes high risk in specific areas, those areas must be given more attention. For example, a child from a high risk family of anti-social behavior, we must pay more attention to social than academic behaviors.
If there is no high risk area, you can either check each area separately or all together in a composite such as the Zinger-Philips Social Competence Index, which judges many interlinked areas.
Another issue in the labeling process is the need to separate based on level of risk. Severe catastrophes that are coped with on an average level should be classified as high resilience, while minor stressors should require higher level of coping.
C – The Sturdiness of Evidence of Resilience
1 – It is difficult in a study to judge if all participants underwent equal levels of adversity. There are issues of subjective verses objective judgment of adversity and if the statistical levels of risk match the actual, and if actual levels can really be known for an individual. It is hard to tell if high risk children are actually high risk, or if they are actually low risk due to support they may receive from other locations that we are not aware off. This may not actually be a problem, but rather if we study the cases of high risk children (as we see them) and discover similarities, that may give us an understanding as to what causes a child to be resilient (such as outside support).
Gordon and Song found that some people may view themselves differently that a scientist views them, and so may feel well off even if scientists say they are in a high stress situation. This also is not a problem because it is the same as all fields in psychology. There may even be an advantage to viewing findings based on the different stand-points. Looking at what causes a person to feel at risk may also aid us in understanding what causes something to be a stressor.
2 – Results of resilience studies are not stable. The number of individuals considered resilient in the study will be dependant on the criteria set for what is considered resilient. We must set levels for what is considered high adversity and what is high resilience. If the same criteria are used in all cases, there will be some where a very small percentage will be considered resilient and others where more than half will be considered very resilient.
This may not be a problem, because by definition, studies are often done on groups which are small in size (such as Down syndrome, autism, etc).
Studies that deal with effects of specific factors have been found to have stable results. Those dealing with interactions have been found to be unstable results.
(This last section is not clear and dealt with a lot of statistics I didn't completely understand so don't rely entirely on my summary).
3 – The resilience research is unstable because high risk individuals rarely maintain stability for the long term.
All individuals tend to show fluctuations in adjustment domains over time. Despite this, however, findings show that children who show high resilience overall, tend to maintain high levels of positive adaptation. Egeland, Carlson, and Sroufe have found that high adaptation during infancy and toddlerhood is related to positive adaptation during elementary school. Cowen found stability in highly stressed low socio-economic children which lasted for over 1 to 2 years. Masten has found patterns of resilience which last from childhood through adolescence.
The author suggests that future ontogenetic studies (I'm not sure what that means) test resilience from multiple standpoints, using both variable based and person based procedures spread out over long periods of time in order to get full insight and conclusions.
D – Theoretical Concerns
1 – Progress in resilience studies will remain constrained so long as studies remain empirically driven instead of theoretically based, with little recognition of the importance of multiple contexts in children's development.
The author agrees that collection of more correlations in resilience will not aid research if they are not done in a context to help build theory in human development. However, the author feels that research to this point has not necessarily come from outside this scope. He feels that there are 3 major frameworks from which research till this point have come from, all of which study children's adjustment across a diversity of influences.
The first of these influences is the idea brought around by Garmzey and Werner and Smith is the protective influences brought around by community, family, and the child themselves. Second, are the ecological-transaction theories (such as Bronfrenbrenner) which deal with an interaction of different levels of the child surroundings. Third are the structural-organizational theories which say there is a level of continuity and coherence with the development of competence over time.
The author believes that this is not a problem, because there are similarities in the development of all children, despite context. What is critical is that when theory is applied to certain cases, the context be taken into account. One example of this is Garcia-Coll's theory of the 8 major constructs in social-stratification of minority children. He takes into account social position (race, gender), racism, segregation (residential and psychological), promoting/inhibiting environments (school, health-care), adaptive culture (traditions), child's characteristics (age, temperament), family values, and developmental competencies.
2 – Some scientists argue that resilience theory adds nothing to developmental theory beyond saying "positive adjustment".
The author agrees that these ideas overlap, however feels it is important to maintain it as a separate field of study. It allows us another viewpoint from which to study development, and says that it is possible for a child to defy normal expectations.
A second reason to maintain resilience as a separate field is that adjustment occurs differently in situations of adversity than when there is no adversity.
In addition, the exclusion of resilience as a separate field tends to exclude an important group of people from the study, because a majority of scientific study is done on upper-middle class, white sample groups. While some findings show similarity between the 2 fields, others show there are differences between high and low risk groups.
Future Directions and Conclusions
A - Directions Stemming from Existing Criticisms
1 – Clarity and consistency in definitions and terminology