Exploring Adolescent Resilience Through the Lens of Core Self-Evaluations

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of resilience and the role it plays in adolescents' lives. Next, we propose a construct that reflects one's own perception of capability and worthiness as a person—core self-evaluations. Core self-evaluation is a higher-order construct consisting of the shared variance of many of the individual characteristics associated with resilience. As such, the introduction of the core self-evaluation construct represents a proposed synthesis of the individual predictors of resilience. This synthesis should help advance the study of the individual characteristics that predict resilience by leading researchers to focus on one overarching trait that predicts resilience rather than several highly related traits, thus allowing related lines of research to "speak" to one another It is our contention that core self-evaluations are an essential and fundamental component of resilience. To support our argument, we also include initial results of an analysis investigating the relationship between core self-evaluations and a variety of educational outcomes related to, and impacted by, resiliency. Finally, we close with a brief discussion of the results of this study, highlight some interventions that follow on from these findings, and offer some future research directions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)