Resilience is a massive field and we’ve been in touch with various other groups doing work in this area over the years. If the work we are doing has whetted your appetite, others could interest you too. Here’s a small list of other people we know doing work on resilience and links to their research resources.
– If you’ve got a research bent, take a look at the Resilience Research Centre co-directed by Dr Michael Ungar, and Dr Linda Liebenberg, who are leading a major international research project on resilience, based in Novia Scotia, Canada. Their team’s work is particularly strong on comparing the development of resilience in different cultural contexts. They’ve also done a lot of qualitative work and have built up expertise in visual methods.
– The Centre for Confidence study is a bit closer to us, up in Glasgow. They run various events on resilience, and have lots of distilled research that you can browse.
– Drs Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein are based in the USA and founded the Raising Resilient Children Foundation. They’ve written a significant number of interesting books on aspects of resilience, including information and strategies for raising children and the resilient mindset quiz for parents. They advertise the books and audio materials that you can buy, but some of their information is downloadable for free.
– The National Center for Children in Poverty is at Colombia University and their website includes information about projects that focus on improving the odds for young children living in poverty.
– The Research in Practice website has a research briefing promoting resilience in children, young people and families, and is aimed at frontline practitioners, particularly social workers, family support workers, foster carers, educational welfare officers, teachers, after-school club and pupil referral unit staff, youth workers, health visitors and children’s centre staff.
Resilience measures
If you gave us a fiver for each time we’ve been asked about getting hold of a good tool to measure resilience, we’d be millionaires by now. Measuring resilience is a very complex field, because it is such a complicated concept to pin down and there are so many different constructs that can go into the mix. If you haven’t got a brain the size of a planet don’t bother trying to do it yourself – it will only end in tears. Instead, get someone else involved who’s done it before.
