A Brief History of Resilience

Abstract

As it enters a new age in its development, resilience research faces many growing pangs (Masten, 1999). It has introduced a hardy and original construct denoting the ability to rebound from acute or chronic adversity. Yet, as Glantz and Slobada (1999) warn, “There is no consensus on the referent of the term, standards for its application, or agreement on its role in explanation, models, and theories” (p. 111). It has been then impetus for an explosion of empirical research and has played a pivotal role in the origin of a new discipline, developmental psychopathology. Yet, in the view of some, it has left matters in disarray. Windle (1999), for example, argues that the resilience literature offers “no organizing framework for integrating studies, for evaluating common and unique findings across different subject populations, variable domains, or spacing interval, or for studying the impact of alternative operational definitions and classification procedures on the identification of resilient individuals” (p. 174). Resilience science has amassed a confident array of scholars who do research as its proponent (see, for example, Cicchetti & Garmezy, 1993; Masten, 2001), yet it has also provoked skepticism, represented in the words of Kaplan (1999), who suggests that it is “a concept whose time has come and gone” (p. 72).