Exploring the gender differences in protective factors: implications for understanding resiliency

Understanding the causes of why individuals desist from or are resilient to delinquency and drug use has become a salient social concern. Much research has centered on the effects that protective factors possess in fostering resiliency but that research has not fully explored how the effects of protective factors might vary across gender. Using a sample of 711 individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Child-Mother data set, the authors investigate how individual protective factors vary across gender on two measures of resiliency that document the lack of involvement in serious delinquency and drug use. They also examine whether the accumulation of protective factors varies across gender in fostering resiliency. The findings suggest that although males and females rely on different individual protective factors to foster resiliency, the accumulation of protective factors appears to be equally important for males and females in promoting resiliency. The authors discuss theoretical and policy implications.