Define resilience
Resilience
Rutter (1990)
• Resilience can be seen as
maintaining adaptive
functioning in spite of
serious risk factors.
Wyman et al. (2000)
• Resilience can be defined as
a child’s achievement of
positive developmental
outcomes and avoidance of
maladaptive outcomes
under adverse conditions.
Define resilience
Approaches to resilience research
• Focus is on both risk factors
in and protective factors.
• What is the difference?
• Example: the early
relationships with caregivers
as these relationships
provide the foundations for
developing secure
attachments, feelings of selfworth, and regulations of
emotions.
Define resilience
How to examine resilience…
• The child is seen as part
of multiple systems
where risk factors and
protective factors are
included in the overall
understanding of
development.
• Focus on how to
promote resilience by
preventative
interventions to help
children at risk (e.g.
parenting programs,
academic programs,
family support).
Define resilience
Wright and Masten (2006)
• claimed that resilience should
not be seen as an individual
trait.
• Individual resilience must be
studied in the context of
adversity and risk in relation
to multiple contextual factors
that interact (e.g. family,
school, neighborhood,
community, and culture) with
individual factors (e.g. the
child’s temperament,
intelligence, and health).
Define resilience
Schoon and Bartley (2008)
• We should examine the
factors and processes that
enable individuals to beat
the odds instead of focusing
on “adaptive functioning of
the individual”. (Why?)
• could lead to the
misunderstanding that
resilience is a matter of
personality traits and that
everyone can make it if they
try hard enough.
Define resilience
Schoon and Bartley (2008)
• Such a dispositional
approach can lead to
blaming the victim of
adverse circumstances.
Instead, there should be
a focus on how to
promote resilience by
removing obstacles and
creating opportunities.
Define resilience