Assessing resilience in emerging adulthood: The Resilience Scale (RS), Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), and Scale of Protective Factors (SPF)

The transition to adulthood, emerging adulthood (EA), is characterized by the reorganization of multiple systems and societal scaffolding coming together to uniquely contribute to development. As a developmental turning point, EA has been a recent focus for researchers investigating both resilience and psychopathology. Resilience scales used in EA samples, within the United States are limited because many have not been validated in EA samples and they often do not assess both social/individual and cognitive/interpersonal determinants of resilience. The purpose of this study was to investigate the measurement models and reliability of commonly used resilience scales in the United States to include the Resilience Scale (RS-25; RS-10), the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale CD-RISC-25; CD-RISC-10), and the Scale of Protective Factors (SPF-24). We used an EA sample of 421 college students reporting significant stress or trauma. The results indicated that the CD-RISC-10, and the SPF-24 are psychometrically sound measures of overall resilience in EA. While the CD-RISC-10 has the benefit of clinical criteria for interpreting scores, the SPF-24 is a more comprehensive measure of resilience due to the representation of social/interpersonal in addition to cognitive/individual determinants of resilience. Practical and clinical implications as well as future directions are discussed.