Coping and Development: An Index of Resilience

Abstract

Resilience is a concept that has captured people's interest in recent years in the hope of being able to readily identify the elements that make young people able to bounce back from adverse circumstances. Coping is an important component of resilience in that it can be conceptualised, operationalised, measured and developed. Since stress and coping have been arguably one of the most widely researched areas in the field of psychology there is a diverse literature. This article provides a brief review of the literature in the field of coping, particularly as it relates to adolescents. It provides a definition of the construct and considers correlates such as age and gender. It draws attention to the paucity of literature on family patterns of coping, such as an exploration of parents and their children's coping. Coping is helpful as part of a person-centred, rather than a situation-centred, approach to risk and resilience.