Resilience in Children and Adolescents Survived Psychologically Traumatic Life Events: A Critical Review of Application of Resilience Assessment Tools for Clinical Referral and Intervention

Abstract

Psychological traumatic life events (TLEs) and resilience, both are multidimensional, complex, and share salient features. Both are products of individual, familial, and environmental (socio-cultural-political contextual) variables, which is very crucial in children and adolescents. This systematic review used Boolean search strategies in electronic databases, namely, PubMED, PsycNET, JStor, and Google scholar. All researches not studying resilience per se but similar or related constructs such as life strengths, hardiness, protective/risk factors, social support, self-efficacy, social-emotional adjustment, and so on were excluded. A total of 12 resilience tools meant for children between 5 and 18 years were reviewed. The scale characteristics were analyzed in terms of targeted age-group of sample; purpose (i.e. screening and profiling for intervention); number of items; purpose/type of scale; year, country, and domain wise distribution; response format, standardization sample profile; psychometric properties; and availability of manual with norms of cutoff score. Although no scale was originally developed for children and adolescent population with history of TLEs particularly various forms of abuse and trauma, Child and Youth Resilience Measure and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale had small samples of children from welfare homes. Neither did any scale tested the divergent validity against absence of any psychopathology or global functioning or poor quality of life Nor did Majority of scales provide a cutoff value for institutionalized children and adolescents with history of TLEs; therefore, using an existing scale for this purpose should be carefully examined. Trauma-focused multidimensionality in resilience needs to be explored more rigorously through mixed methods.

A systematic review of cross-cultural measures of resilience and its promotive and protective factors

“…All population groups were considered for inclusion, regardless of how specific the study might have been with regards to age, occupation, socioeconomic status, or specific stressors to which individuals were exposed, as well as populations in both “normal” (i.e., non-treatment) circumstances and clinical settings. Moreover, this review was specifically concerned with studies that had explicitly considered the development, adaptation, or validation of a resilience measure in a novel context, in contrast to other reviews that have looked at the role of mixed methods studies of resilience more generally (Tol, Jordans, et al, 2013) or the psychometric properties of existing scales ( Satapathy et al, 2020 ; Windle et al, 2011 ; Zhou et al, 2020 ).…”

“…A secondary aim of this review is to aggregate the PPFP of resilience identified across this collection of cross-cultural measures into a resource for investigators adapting a standardized measure. Although reviews of resilience measures have been conducted elsewhere ( Satapathy et al, 2020 ; Windle et al, 2011 ; Zhou et al, 2020 ), these have been primarily concerned with psychometric properties of measures, as opposed to their capacity for cross-cultural use and their ability to inform the development of context-sensitive scales with greater cultural relevance to the population of interest.…”

Challenges, Coping, and Personal Strengths during COVID-19: Lessons from the Experiences of at-Risk Young Adults in Israel

“…In accordance with this perspective, resilient individuals are capable of demonstrating sustained competence under stress. Resilience has also been conceptualized as a performance outcome of positive adaptation despite risk status, of recovery from trauma, or of overcoming negative multiple environmental threats and stressful experiences [26][27][28][29]. As the theoretical and empirical discourse has developed, resilience has been portrayed as a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation.…”

A scoping review of recommendations in the English language on conducting research with trauma-exposed populations since publication of the Belmont report; thematic review of existing recommendations on research with trauma-exposed populations

“…Nonetheless, several authors recommended increasing research on the effects of participation in trauma research [23,26,30,31,74,75,77,80,81,118,152] as well as educating IRBs on the possible benefits of trauma-focused research [23,77,80]. Articles on methodology concerned sampling and data collection [153][154][155][156], a need to use consistent measures and not conflate different constructs [123,127,128], a need to see participants as potentially being both survivors and perpetrators of violence [122], and the nocebo effect in trauma research [119]. Researchers offered recommendations on improving internal research validity when potential control group members with trauma do not identify themselves as having trauma [31,121], and many recommended using participatory research methods to conduct better research [132,135,137,138,155].…”