Predictors of Resilience in Men Coping with a Severe Life Problem

Background and Purpose:  Under a stress-coping-resilience paradigm, we examined the factors associated with resilience, the ability to “bounce back” from adversity, in a diverse sample of 258 adult males who had experience a highly stressful life event within the past five years. The study aim was to identify factors related to the process of coping with a stressful life event. A purposive sample of males was selected to capture extremes in anticipated levels of resilience, ranging from individuals expected to have very low levels of resilience, as contrasted with others anticipated to have very high levels of resilience. Within the framework of stress-coping theory, active coping is often regarded as adaptive, whereas passive coping is often, but not always maladaptive. 

Methods:  This purposive sample consisted of an expected lowest-resilience group, consisting of drug addicted males in treatment.  The rationale for their selection was that as a group drug addicts often "hit bottom" and exhibit very low levels of resilience. By contrast, high-functioning community residents were selected as exemplars of high resilience, given their ongoing capacity to deal constructively with difficult life problems. A total of 258 males were recruited from both criterion groups and were administered a mixed-methods interview.  The Connor Davidson resilience scale was used to measure resilience, and also as the dependent variable in a planned regression model analysis. As expected, the drug addicts relative to the community residents exhibited significantly lower levels of resilience scores, t (256)= 7.10, p < .001.  Given this purposive sampling, drug use group was used as a control variable in the first step of this regression model analysis. A second predictor was the individual’s cognitive complexity, an indicator of the capacity to think in detail about life problems.  In step 3, we incorporated the perceived severity of the difficult life problem, and in step 4 we examined the effect of problem-solving coping.

Results:  This 4-step regression model was significant overall, final model F (4, 253)= 10.82, p< .001, R²= .146.  In this final step, the respective predictors and their regression coefficients were: (1) the drug user group (the control variable) STD β= -.268, p< .001; cognitive complexity, β= .11, p= .07; problem severity,  β= .016, β= .792; and problem solving coping, β= .153, p= .013.  After controlling for drug user status, problem solving coping is a significant predictor of greater resilience.  Also, greater cognitive complexity appears to be also important as a contributor of greater resilience.    

Implications:  Among adult males, teaching the capacity to engage in active problem-solving coping appears to be an important factor in developing resilience. Another implication is that adult men who exhibit a higher capacity to think in detail about ways of coping with a difficult life problem, and who plan their problem solving actions to eliminate the problem will exhibit higher resilience. Accordingly, resilience enhancement interventions could be more efficacious if incorporating as core components, activities that foster ways to think in greater detail about a difficult life problem, followed by skills training in problem solving coping.