New Article Live!
When we think about resilience we think of it in terms of an individual capacity, usually as either a genetic pre-disposition to handle hardship or the attributes that we have in terms of mental skills, strategies or our behaviours that allow us to continue under adversity or in the face of challenge. Under this construct either a nature vs nurture or a combination of both, the common belief is that if we focus on specific interventions or strategies, we can improve our tolerance to cope with difficulty and continue to move forward on our path.
Most of the available research has focused on this ideology and relied upon self-reported testing of resilience through several variations of questionnaires and then looked to identify any relationship between the self-reporting results and various tasks or compared them to the effectiveness of an intervention. Most of the available research has also only been published where a positive result is present. Negative or inconclusive findings are rarely, if ever reported, leading to a positive bias of results in the literature. More comprehensive analysis of studies looking at the total effectiveness of resilience interventions and strategies have generally found positive impacts but generally only a very small effect size and rarely ever compared to actual resilience against a real-life problem.
Continuing to think in terms of resilience as an individual capacity and rely on specific strategies to make any improvement is equivalent to applying first aid or treating a symptom without ever investigating the underlying mechanism or cause.
Head over to our Knowledge Base to read the full article.
