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QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH C hildren and youth develop into mature adults depending on the extent of intrinsic assets such as perseverance, efficacy, self-esteem, and active avoidance of risk-taking behaviours, and extrinsic assets such as living in a nurturing environment with supportive parents, having a non-delinquent peer group and experiencing a healthy school climate. 1-3 When faced with adversity and risk, some youth will survive and even thrive while others will succumb to risky and possibly self-destructive behaviour. Those who thrive under adversity (e.g., poverty, maltreatment, loss of a parent) exhibit engagement in processes described as resilience. 4,5 Measurement of resilience can enable identification of modifiable factors that can be used to inform research and policy initiatives to help youth develop the capacity they require to cope with adversity during normative and non-normative developmental transitions. 6 The complexity of resilience as a construct, however, makes it challenging to measure. Resilience can be defined as an individual's capacity to navigate to health-enhancing resources that nurture individual, relational, and community assets, as well as the capacity of individuals to negotiate with others for these resources to be provided to them in culturally meaningful ways. 7 This socioecological definition implies that individual-, peer-, family-, schooland community-level resources protect and promote good outcomes by helping individuals engage in interactive processes within complex, multi-level environments that make it possible for them to avoid potential threats to their development. 8 Positive development, however, is contextual since a youth may thrive under one adverse circumstance but succumb under another. 9 As well, a youth's ability to cope over time may vary, 1,2,10 particularly during growth and development, and when processes associated with resilience interact with specific risk factors associated with culture, ethnoracial status, ability, gender, and socioeconomic status. 11 The 28-item Child and Health Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM) 12,13 was designed to measure youth resilience while accounting for diverse social contexts across numerous cultures. The CYRM-28 is a self-report instrument validated originally with a purposeful sample of 1,451 youth growing up facing diverse forms of adversity in 11 countries (

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A scoping review of programs targeting middle school students suggests that resilience is seldom the result of interventions within schools alone, or any other single system that provides services to students. Instead, resilience is shown to be a multidimensional construct, involving both exposure to risk and access to multiple internal and external resources. Based on a scoping review of outcomes from 36 interventions, we highlight the elements of successful programs with vulnerable students and reasons for why some programs appear to be less effective or have a negative impact. Less successful programs tended to be those that did not include a cultural component or show sensitivity to contextual variations among students like the size of their community, access to other services and supports, or the economic status of the child's family. The biases of funders, researchers and educators also influence the choice of resilience-promoting intervention made available in a school rather than the specific needs of the targeted student population. We conclude with several recommendations for more effective interventions with students and the implications of our findings to the evaluation of program outcomes.

Search for the term resilience and one finds definitions that vary widely between fields as diverse as ecology, disaster management, developmental psychology, neuroscience, engineering, and economics. Each definition emphasizes a shift in focus from breakdown and disorder to systemic recovery, adaptation, or systemwide transformation during and after exposure to adversity. Seldom, however, have researchers in the natural and human sciences explored the link between the resilience of one system and the resilience of mutually dependent, co-occurring supraordinate and subordinate systems. In this chapter, the author presents a comprehensive theory of resilience that draws together the research done by a range of disciplines where the term resilience has been used as an organizing concept. Using this diverse body of work, this chapter (a) starts with a discussion of definitions that both distinguish fields of resilience research from one another and suggests concurrence in how resilience is understood; (b) presents a model that accounts for the complex reciprocal relationships that enhance the resilience of co-occurring biological, psychological, social, built, and natural systems; (c) reviews seven principles that explain the processes of recovery, adaptation, and transformation of systems under stress; and (4) discusses the implications of a systemic understanding of resilience to the design of interventions that promote change to preferred patterns of functioning when systems are under stress.

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