Scientific background: Resilience

About this test

The Brief Resilience Scale was developed by Bruce W. Smith and colleagues in 2008, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. The authors deliberately designed it to fill a gap they identified in existing resilience research: many older resilience scales actually measure resources associated with resilience (e.g. social support, optimism, sense of purpose) rather than the ability to recover itself, making it hard to tell whether someone is resilient or simply has access to more resources. The BRS was validated across four samples (undergraduate students, cardiac rehabilitation patients, people with fibromyalgia, and a community sample of women) and has since become one of the most widely used brief resilience measures in health psychology research, showing good internal consistency and correlating with better physical and psychological health outcomes after adversity.

Dimensions

Sources & license

• Smith, B. W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., & Bernard, J. (2008). The brief resilience scale: assessing the ability to bounce back. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 15(3), 194–200.

  No public-domain or explicit copyright-free declaration was found for the BRS, but it circulates freely for non-commercial use with citation -- for example, it is hosted and distributed directly by university counseling/wellness centers (this item wording is verified against Ohio State University's own BRS handout, which cites the original 2008 paper). The descriptive interpretation bands below (below 3.00 low, 3.00-4.30 normal, above 4.30 high resilience) come from a combined adult sample (n=844, mean 3.70) reported in later work by the same lead author and reproduced in numerous subsequent BRS validation studies -- they are descriptive reference ranges, not clinically validated cutoffs.

  https://ogg.osu.edu/media/documents/MB%20Stream/Brief%20Resilience%20Scale.pdf