Exactly three years ago, I embarked on investigating the construct of resilience for a PhD. At first, I thought resilience was the innate ability for some people to bounce back from life’s challenges . It was a thing you either had or didn’t have. A trait you are born with. Oh how wrong I was! As my research unfolded, I realised that resilience is a construct that should be defined and measured (contact us if you want to know more) in a specific context dependent way. It is a term that should be used in a constrained way as resilience is decidedly different depending on the context in which it is inferred.
What does that all mean? Well, I guess in short, resilience is best seen as a range of resources internal and external to the individual that are drawn upon to positively adapt to adverse experiences. For example, my research was situated in the palliative care context and some of the key resources I identified in this group of professionals included social support, optimism, and self-efficacy. Building on these findings I decided to develop a method of measuring resilience using both a survey and situational judgement test. The point of this was to come at resilience from a person-environment assessment approach rather than measuring resilience as a trait. Once you get the measurement of a construct such as resilience right, only then can you start to think about identifying these people in organisations that may need to build their adaptive resilience resources.
In the end, I decided that resilience was probably not a word I would use any more in its own right. I concluded that instead of referring to a global ‘resilience’ term, it should be used as a referent term for a multitude of adaptive resources that infer resilience.
Well, I have tried to keep this précis of my PhD blog short at the request of my Lucent colleagues. Not an easy task! On a final note, I can highly recommend doing a PhD to anyone who loves to learn. I can honestly say the PhD experience has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. It has also been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. If I have learnt anything….it is that a PhD is a good test of persistence, drive, and passion. It’s hard work but worth every ounce of effort - maybe it was in fact my own personal test of resilience.
