This instrument is intended to serve as a tool for local and state educational agencies and researchers to use in assessing and understanding a variety of external and internal resilience factors associated with positive youth development. It will enable the collection of local and statewide youth resilience data for use in needs assessment, program planning, program evaluation, and research. Ultimately this module should help advance the field's understanding of the network of relationships between protective factors, resilience traits, health promoting behaviors, and other positive developmental outcomes. Work to date has involved convening a research panel of national experts on positive youth development and its measurement, developing a conceptual framework based on the best current work in the field, reviewing and critiquing existing resilience assessment instruments, developing and selecting items and scales, and conducting pilot tests, cognitive analyses, and extensive field testing of the instrument in schools throughout California.
Additional analyses are underway.
The following documents are in pdf format and require the Adobe Acrobat Reader . The Healthy Kids Resilience Assessment . Paper presented at the 1999 Society for Prevention Research National Conference, New Orleans.