Resilience is not a unidimensional construct: Insights from a prospective study of inner-city adolescents

Abstract

The maintenance of high social competence despite stress was examined in a 6-month prospective study of 138 inner-city ninth-grade students. The purpose was to provide a replication and extension of findings derived from previous cross-sectional research involving a comparable sample of children. Specifically, goals were to examine the extent to which high-stress children with superior functioning on one or more aspects of school-based social competence could evade significant difficulties in (a) other spheres of competence at school and (b) emotional adjustment. Measurements of stress were based on uncontrollable negative life events. Competence was assessed via behavioral indices including school grades, teacher ratings, and peer ratings, and emotional distress was measured via self-reports. Results indicated that high-stress children who showed impressive behavioral competence were highly vulnerable to emotional distress over time. Furthermore, almost 85% of the high-stress children who seemed resilient based on at least one domain of social competence at Time 1 had significant difficulties in one or more domains examined when assessed at both Time 1 and Time 2. Findings are discussed in terms of conceptual and empirical issues in resilience research.As empirical research on childhood resilience in the face of stress gathers momentum, increasingly sophisticated research designs are being used. Prospective studies, for example, have built upon preliminary cross-sectional findings in studying stress resistance among school-age and early adolescent children (e.g., DuBois, Felner, Brand, Adan, & Evans, 1992;Dubow & Tisak, 1989;Dubow, Tisak, Causey, Hryshko, & Reid, 1991). Although inner-city teenagers are a group at extremely high risk for a range of behavior problems (Farrington, 1987;Snyder & Patterson, 1987), there have been relatively few attempts to systematically study resilience in this group. The goal of this study was to use short-term longitudinal data to build upon initial exploratory findings (Luthar, 1991) in investigating aspects of resilience among socioeconomically disadvantaged high school students. Internalizing Symptoms and ResilienceIn contemporary research on children, resilience has typically been defined in terms of success in meeting developmental tasks or societal expectations, as reflected in overt, behavioral indices such as school grades and ratings by teachers, peers, and parents (Luthar Copyright © 1993 & Zigler, 1991). The assumption underlying this operational definition is that manifest competence usually reflects good underlying coping skills (Garmezy & Masten, 1986, 1991.Recent empirical evidence has indicated, however, that among high-risk children, those who are behaviorally competent are not necessarily well adjusted on indices of emotional adjustment (Luthar & Zigler, 1991). To illustrate, in a recent study on children of depressed parents, Radke-Yarrow and Sherman (1990) reported that although some children seemed to be surviving relatively well (e.g., in terms o...

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