Resilience is:

- Bouncing Back? Bouncing Up? Bouncing Forward?
- Doing better than you'd think given the circumstances?
- Beating the odds?

Google ‘resilience’ and you’ll get over 7 million hits.  From understanding how to improve the lot of kids going through tough times, to choosing tights that won’t ladder, ‘resilience’ is in the frame. 

‘Resilience’ has been wheeled on to explain differences in how well individuals cope with adversity. It’s used in thinking on disaster relief, planning community development initiatives, advertising the latest wrinkle-diminishing face cream, and in school settings, improving children’s ability to bounce back.

But what exactly does the word mean? And, is it really that useful for anyone interested in helping people overcome serious inequalities?

In this resilience section we will try to introduce:

• Definitions of resilience - Providing examples of how researchers and practitioners understand the term, and
• Ways of measuring resilience - Listing a few links to folk working on ways to measure resilience