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.

Figure 1

Interactions between stress and peer-rated competence in predicting changes in self-reported symptoms: prospective analyses. Competence and stress are based on assessments at Time 1. Outcome variables are Time 2 scores on internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and depression, and in the analyses, the same scores at Time 1 are controlled for.

Figure 2

Profiles across domains among children who showed superior competence, by stress group. The first bar in each graph represents the number of children in the groups based on stress levels. The rest of the bars represent frequencies of these children with cumulative exclusionary criteria: (a) the number with high scores on one or more social competence (SC) domains; (b) the subset of these children who were also not in the lowest third on any of the other SC indices; (c) those who were also not in the highest third on any self-reported symptoms, and (d) those who also showed no significant difficulties across domains at Time 2 (T2). The figure at the top pertains to apparently resilient (high stress, high competence) children; other groups are presented for comparison purposes.