Resilience may be viewed as a measure of stress coping ability and, as such, could
be an important target of treatment in anxiety, depression, and stress reactions.
We describe a new rating scale to assess resilience. The Connor-Davidson Resilience
scale (CD-RISC) comprises of 25 items, each rated on a 5-point scale (0-4), with higher
scores reflecting greater resilience. The scale was administered to subjects in the
following groups: community sample, primary care outpatients, general psychiatric
outpatients, clinical trial of generalized anxiety disorder, and two clinical trials
of PTSD. The reliability, validity, and factor analytic structure of the scale were
evaluated, and reference scores for study samples were calculated. Sensitivity to
treatment effects was examined in subjects from the PTSD clinical trials. The scale
demonstrated good psychometric properties and factor analysis yielded five factors.
A repeated measures ANOVA showed that an increase in CD-RISC score was associated
with greater improvement during treatment. Improvement in CD-RISC score was noted
in proportion to overall clinical global improvement, with greatest increase noted
in subjects with the highest global improvement and deterioration in CD-RISC score
in those with minimal or no global improvement. The CD-RISC has sound psychometric
properties and distinguishes between those with greater and lesser resilience. The
scale demonstrates that resilience is modifiable and can improve with treatment, with
greater improvement corresponding to higher levels of global improvement.
Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.