Methodological issues in assessing resilience in maltreated children

Efforts to assess resilience in maltreated children reveal methodological difficulties in developing operational definitions of resilience. This paper discusses six methodological issues: (1) distinguishing between resilience and factors promoting or reducing resilience; (2) choosing sources of measures; (3) determining how many sources and measures to use; (4) selecting scoring criteria to indicate resilience; (5) determining when to measure resilience; and (6) examining the stability of resilience over time.

Understanding resilience in maltreated children is important for developing ways to promote competence in more vulnerable maltreated children. Although the classification of children as resilient depends on how resilience is defined, there is no consensus regarding operational definitions of resilience. By focusing more attention on the issue of resilience, research on maltreated children can help resolve methodological difficulties in defining and measuring the concept.