How To Measure Resilience With These 8 Resilience Scales (+PDF)

How To Measure Resilience

When we experience disaster, trauma, or distressing psychological issues, we usually react with grief and a range of negative emotions.

This is, of course, a natural reaction to having our hopes dashed or our goals thwarted. However, such experiences are not only an inevitable part of life but virtually required for growth and development.

Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work through difficult problems.

Gever Tulley

These are the exact sort of experiences that build resilience. With resilience, you can work through the effects of stress and negative emotions and not only bounce back, but actually thrive.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2015) defines individual resilience as the ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity and stress. In other words, resilience can manifest as maintaining or returning to one’s original state of mental health or wellbeing or reaching a more mature and well-developed state of mental health or wellbeing through the use of effective coping strategies.

In order to grasp and effectively develop resilience, it is critical to understand the factors contributing to resilience.

Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our 3 Resilience Exercises for free. These engaging, science-based exercises will help you to effectively deal with difficult circumstances and give you the tools to improve the resilience of your clients, students or employees.

You can download the free PDF here.

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Components of Resilience

Resilience is defined differently depending on who you ask; psychological researchers may have one working definition (or many!), while those who work directly with people who are struggling often see it differently.

There is no single accepted set of components of resilience, but this set of characteristics and contributing factors can provide a useful guide:

• Optimism – those who are optimistic tend to be more resilient as well since they are more likely to stay positive about the future even when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
• Altruism – the most resilient among us often turn to help others when they need to relieve stress and boost their self-efficacy.
• Moral Compass – people with a strong moral compass or steadfast set of beliefs about right and wrong generally have an easier time bouncing back.
• Faith and Spirituality – while not a required factor for resilience, people often find their faith helpful in surviving challenges and coming through stronger and wiser on the other side.
• Humor – people who have a healthy sense of humor and are able to laugh at their own misfortune are at an advantage when it comes to bouncing back, for obvious reasons!
• Having a Role Model – this is also not a requirement for resilience, but those who have a role model in mind can draw strength from their desire to emulate this person.
• Social Supports – unsurprisingly, social support is important when it comes to resilience; those with strong social support networks are better equipped to bounce back from loss or disappointment.
• Facing Fear – this is not so much a characteristic as an action or tendency to act, but people who are willing to leave their comfort zone and confront their fears are more likely to overcome their challenges and grow as a person.
• Meaning or Purpose in Life – it shouldn’t be surprising that those who feel they have a specific purpose in life or find a tremendous amount of meaning in their lives are more likely to recover from failure or disappointment; when you fervently believe you have a purpose, you are less likely to give up when faced with tragedy or loss.
• Training – while a portion of individual resilience may be somewhat permanent and unchangeable, there is an opportunity for improvement; it is possible to improve your resilience through training (Staroverky, 2012).

These components are not present in each and every measure of resilience, but they form a good basis for understanding the nature and scope of resilience. It should be easy to spot most of them in at least one of the eight resilience scales described below.

Seeing the many individual cogs that make up the resilience machine, it is easy to imagine that there are many different ways to define and measure resilience. Indeed, there are virtually countless ways that resilience has been described, and many different methods of measuring it.

The resilience scales below are all useful tools in providing a measure of resilience, but you will see that they are built on different theories, based on different components, and/or created for different populations. Depending on the context in which it will be applied, one resilience scale may be more appropriate than others.

8 Resilience Scales

Components of Resilience

With the importance of context and intended use in mind, we attempted to provide a diverse sample of resilience scales in the hopes that at least one of them may meet your needs.

While there are dozens of resilience measures out there for you to explore, we narrowed them down to the eight most popular and most empirically based resilience scales. These scales are listed and described below.

1) Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC)

A study conducted by Windle, Bennett, & Noyes (2011) reviewed nineteen resilience measures. However, out of nineteen, only three of them received superior psychometric ratings, one of which is the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC).

This scale was originally developed by Connor-Davidson (2003) as a self-report measure of resilience within the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) clinical community (CD-RISC, n.d.). It is a validated and widely recognized scale with 2, 10, and 25 items which measure resilience as a function of five interrelated components:

1. Personal Competence
2. Acceptance of Change and Secure Relationships
3. Trust/Tolerance/Strengthening Effects of Stress
4. Control
5. Spiritual Influences

With an extensive number of studies using this tool, conducted within a varied range of populations, the CD-RISC is considered one of the higher scoring scales in the psychometric evaluation of resilience (Windle, Bennett, & Noyes, 2011).

2) Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA)

The RSA, another resilience scale rated highly by Windle, Bennett, & Noyes (2011), was authored by Friborg et al. (2003) as a self-report scale targeting adults. It is recommended for use in the health and clinical psychology population.

This scale has five scoring items that examine both the intrapersonal and interpersonal protective factors that promote adaptation to adversity.

The authors, Friborg et al. (2003), noted the key factors which contribute to highly resilient individuals, namely family support and cohesion, external support systems, and dispositional attitudes and behaviors, which the scale items are founded on. They are:

• Personal Competence
• Social Competence
• Social Support
• Family Coherence
• Personal Structure

A later study performed by Friborg et al. (2005) used the RSA to measure the relationship between personality, intelligence, and resilience. They found many links between personality and resilience factors, such as the connection between higher personal competence and elevated emotional stability. There were, however, no significant findings related to cognitive ability (Friborg et al., 2005).

This is in line with Windle et al. (2011), who concluded that the RSA is highly useful for assessing the protective factors which inhibit or provide a buffer against psychological disorders.

3) Brief Resilience Scale

While most resilience assessments look into the factors which develop resilience, The Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) is a self-rating questionnaire aimed at measuring an individuals’ ability to “bounce back from stress”. This instrument, developed by Smith et al. (2008), has not been used in the clinical population; however, it could provide some key insights for individuals with health-related stress (Smith, et al., 2008).

Amat et al. (2014) explain that the BRS instrument consists of six items, three positively worded items, and three negatively worded items. All six relate to the individual’s ability to bounce back from adversity. The scale’s development controlled for protective factors such as social support in order to get a reliable resilience measure (Smith, et al., 2008).

This is the third and final resilience measure noted by Windle et al. (2011) as a highly valid and reliable measure of resilience, but there are many more with evidence to back their effectiveness.

4) Resilience Scale

This scale is the oldest scale on our list but is still in use by many researchers. The Resilience Scale, developed by Wagnild and Young in 1993, was created and validated with a sample of older adults (aged 53 to 95 years). This scale consists of 25 items and the results have been found to positively correlate with physical health, morale, and life satisfaction, while negatively correlating with depression.

The scale is intended to measure resilience based on five essential characteristics:

1. Meaningful Life (or Purpose)
2. Perseverance
3. Self-Reliance
4. Equanimity
5. Existential Aloneness

These five characteristics are assessed using two subscales, the 17-item Personal Competence subscale and the 8-item Acceptance of Self and Life subscale.

Subsequent validation of the scale in 2009 by Wagnild reaffirmed its internal consistency and construct validity, supporting its continued effectiveness as a tool for the assessment of resilience.

In addition to the original 25-item scale, there is a shortened 14-item scale that has also proven to be valid and reliable in measuring resilience (Abiola & Udofia, 2011).

5) Scale of Protective Factors (SPF)

The Scale of Protective Factors (SPF) was developed by Ponce-Garcia, Madwell, and Kennison in 2015 to capture a comprehensive measurement of resilience. The authors tested and validated this resilience scale in a sample of nearly 1,000 college students, and found the SPF to be a valid and reliable measure of resilience for measuring resilience, especially in groups identified as survivors of violent trauma.

This scale measures resilience in a slightly different way than the previously mentioned scales. It focuses on the factors that combine to create a buffer between individuals who have experienced trauma and the stress and disruption to functioning that can follow, rather the components that constitute resilience directly.

It consists of 24 items measuring two social-interpersonal factors ( and ) and two cognitive-individual factors ( and ).

The SPF has since been validated in a review of resilience scales by Madewell and Ponce-Garcia (2016), providing evidence of its validity and effectiveness in clinical use.

6) Predictive 6-Factor Resilience Scale

The Predictive 6-Factor Resilience Scale was developed based on the neurobiological underpinnings of resilience and the theorized relationship with health hygiene factors (Roussouw & Roussouw, 2016).

The PR6 measures resilience as a function of six domains concerning several interrelated concepts:

• Vision: self-efficacy and goal-setting
• Composure: emotional regulation and the ability to identify, understand, and act on internal prompts and physical signals
• Tenacity: perseverance and hardiness
• Reasoning: higher cognitive traits, like problem-solving, resourcefulness, and thriving
• Collaboration: psychosocial interaction, such as secure attachment, support networks, context, and humor
• Health: physiological health

The PR6 was found to have good internal consistency and correlate with other measures of resilience as well as health hygiene scores.

Based on these results, the PR6 can be considered an effective measurement and a particularly good assessment for use in improving resilience.

7) Ego Resilience Scale

This scale was developed by Block and Kremen in 1996 for use in measuring resilience in non-psychiatric contexts. While the authors term their construct “ego resiliency,” it is basically resilience as we know it viewed in terms of adaptability to changes in one’s circumstances.

The Resilience Scale (RS-14) consists of 14 items rated on a scale from 1 = does not apply to 4 = applies very strongly, with higher scores indicating higher levels of resilience.

Scores on this scale have been found to positively correlate with intelligence as it relates to the ability to adapt, supporting the scale’s ability to assess an individual’s ability to bounce back from failure and disappointment.

8) Academic Resilience Scale (ARS-30)

Finally, the Academic Resilience Scale (ARS-30) is a recently developed measure used to assess resilience in a particular context: academic success. Simon Cassidy (2016) describes academic resilience as the tendency to persevere and succeed in education despite meeting with adversity. It is a multi-dimensional construct focusing on both cognitive affective and behavioral responses to academic adversity.

The ARS-30 is based on responses to a vignette describing a significant academic challenge, rated on a scale from 1 = likely to 5 = unlikely.

The items in this scale fall into one of three factors:

1. Perseverance
2. Reflecting and Adaptive Help-Seeking
3. Negative Affect and Emotional Response

High scores on factors 1 and 2 and low scores on factor 3 indicate high resilience.

This scale was found to be highly internally reliable, and scores correlated significantly with a measure of academic self-efficacy. While the ARS-30 is most appropriate in academic contexts, scores can be useful in other situations as well.

Resilience at Work (and Why It Matters)

Brief Resilience Scale