A Systematic Review of Strengths and Resilience Outcome Literature Relevant to Children and Adolescents
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A Systematic Review of Strengths and Resilience Outcome Literature Relevant to Children and Adolescents Keith Brownlee • Jennine Rawana • Jessica Franks Julie Harper • Jasmine Bajwa • Erin O’Brien • Ashley Clarkson
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Published online: 28 March 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract The concepts of strengths and resilience are essential for understanding and promoting positive development in children and adolescents. These concepts have been studied in the research literature for many years and more recently have been applied to child and adolescent assessment and intervention research. However, strength and resilience based intervention programs have not been evaluated rigorously for their use of empirical methodology. In this article, we systematically identified and reviewed all of the outcome studies over the last decade for strength and resilience based intervention programs to assess the extent to which these studies utilized controlled empirical methodology. The results of the review yielded 11 outcome studies that examined strength and resilience based practices. Using the Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies developed by the Effective Public Health Practice Project, we found three studies to be high quality, exhibiting high
K. Brownlee (&) School of Social Work, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1, Canada e-mail: [email protected] J. Rawana Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada J. Franks ErinoakKids Centre for Treatment and Development, Mississauga, ON, Canada J. Franks Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada J. Harper J. Bajwa E. O’Brien Department of Psychology, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada A. Clarkson Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
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levels of experimentally controlled research. The remaining 8 studies we considered to be moderate to weak quality research. We concluded that these 11 studies provide preliminary support for the efficacy of strength and resilience based interventions. Our systematic review also highlights areas where methodology in future studies can be strengthened to provide more conclusive evidence of these approaches. Keywords Resiliency Psychological strengths Childhood development Strengths intervention Strength-based practice
Introduction Over the past two decades, the children’s mental health service sector has undergone a shift from focusing on deficits to a more optimistic and positive view of child development. This recent interest in positive development tends to take two forms—a focus on strengths and a focus on resiliency. First, independent from resiliency research there has been a growing interest in strengths or the positive characteristics of individuals. The strengths perspective was initially proposed by Weick et al. (1989) as a model that was founded upon the assumption that all individuals, including children, have strengths. This perspective assumes that all youth, even those with diagnosable emotional and
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