Conceptualising and operationalising resilience in older adults

ABSTRACTContext: As a result of increases in life expectancy and decreases in fertility, the proportion of the population entering later life has increased dramatically in recent decades. When faced with age-related challenges, some older adults respond more positively to adversity than would be expected given the level of adversity that they have experienced, demonstrating ‘resilience’.Objectives: Having a clear conceptual framework for resilience is a prerequisite to operationalising resilience in a research context.Methods: Here we compare and contrast several approaches to the operationalisation of resilience: psychometric-driven and data-driven (variable-centred and individual-centred) methods.Results: Psychometric-driven methods involve the administration of established questionnaires aimed at quantifying resilience. Data-driven techniques use statistical procedures to examine and/or operationalise resilience and can be broadly categorised into variable-centred methods, i.e. interaction and residual...