Empirical Support for Resilience as More than the Counterpart and Absence of Vulnerability and Symptoms of Mental Disorder

Abstract

The construct of resilience has been viewed as the direct counterpart of factors jeopardizing mental health, i.e., vulnerability and psychopathology. Any operationalization of resilience, thus, risks lying on the same latent continuum as indicators of mental illness, although indicating their absence. A factor analysis combining items from these measurement domains, followed by analyses of second-order factor scores was performed to test this assumption. A random selection of 1,724 participants (34% response rate) from the general population of Norway responded. All items were discriminated well by their primary factors. A second-order factor analysis extracted two components, which was confirmed on a hold-out sample by confirmatory factor methods. The Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA), which measures protective factors, correlated with both second-order factors. Thus, the RSA shared common variance with vulnerability and psychopathology, as well as being unique from illness indices. A hierarchical regression analysis that tested interactions between vulnerability and resilience further supported the unique contributions of the RSA. Thus, the notion of resilience-protective indicators as solely counterparts of vulnerability and psychopathology is not empirically supported.