Masten – study of resilience 1

The scientific study of resilience got underway around 1970, plus or minus a few years, so it, you know, really grew out of the study of risk, people who were trying to understand the origins of mental health problems, but when they started studying children at risk, they began to realize that there were a lot of children and families who were doing better than they expected, and people got intrigued with studying the phenomenon of resilience, and since that time there have been four waves of research, and science, the first wave typical of an emerging area was descriptive, you know, what is resilience, who is doing well and who isn’t, what makes a difference, what are the promotive or protective factors that seem to make a difference.  

And then as people began to get an idea of what those factors were, they wanted to understand how they work because the ultimate goal is to try to intervene to promote resilience and in order to do that effectively, you need to know how the processes leading to resilience actually work. So people began to do more studies of processes. The first wave gave people an idea of, you know, what makes the difference such as, you know, good cognitive skills, good parenting and so forth, and in the second wave, they tried to really focus on what are parents doing that helps their children in this kind of a situation, because maybe if we could teach or help other parents do this, for their children in a similar situation, we could promote resilience, in a family.  

And so there was a lot of research, and that’s still underway, on how resilience works, the ‘how’ question. And then, as people gained confidence that they understood some of these processes, they were willing to try them out in a design where you could intervene and do an experiment and see if we try to put this protective process into place, mobilize these protections, try to help children, does it work the way we think it will, if we try to change and support parents for example during an economic crisis so that they can be a more effective parents even though they’re struggling, do we see better outcomes in the children. And the research supported a lot of these ideas; there were some great research with experimental designs, prevention and intervention research that strongly corroborated theories of change about resilience, that in fact if you do help children with their cognitive skills or help parents with their parenting skills that you see a positive change in how the children are doing under very difficult circumstances, so that wave also is still unfolding over time,