Quantitative Research Tools

The quantitative measures being developed by the Resilience Research Centre are based on an iterative process begun in early 2003 with our partners in more than a dozen countries on six continents. Rather than exporting tools developed in western contexts for use with youth in different cultures, we have been developing measures that include participation of researchers and community members from many different cultures in their design. Our hope has been to introduce novel concepts relevant to resilience that may not be as common among populations with Anglo-European / western backgrounds. The result has been that our measures are sensitive to factors like the social ecologies in which children live, the rites of passage they experience, and their ethnoracial heritage, as well as more common individual qualities like persistence, likeability, and problem-solving.


The Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM)

The Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM) was established through a process of interviews with youth and adults in countries around the world. Reflection on what obstacles youth confront, as well as possible resources called upon to navigate through and/or around these obstacles, resulted in the original 58-item version of the CYRM. Piloting with 1451 youth in 14 communities in 11 countries allowed us to reduce the instrument to its current 28-item version. Information on the measure’s emerging reliability and validity is contained in a number of publications.

As with all the measures developed by the RRC, it is recommended that the CYRM be used as part of a mixed methods research design that includes qualitative research methods to contextualize both the measure and the study’s results.

Please see our list of publications or email us at rrc@dal.ca to request the CYRM Manual for more details.


The Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure (PRYM)

The CYRM is currently being used in many countries around the world. It has also been included as one of a number of concurrent measures of resilience in the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure (PRYM) which is being used as part of the Pathways to Resilience Study. Data from this study will help validate the CYRM as a psychometrically sound measure that can distinguish resilient youth from vulnerable youth across cultures.

The PRYM, comprising validated subscales and other questions, measures

• The risk a child or youth, ages 9-23, encounters in his or her social and physical ecology.

• The resilience a child or youth, ages 9-23, shows coping with significant levels of adversity.

• The child or youth’s service use patterns, including which services are most and least helpful, and why.

Specific subscales and embedded measures of the PRYM include

• Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ, Goodman, 1997), a brief behavioural screening questionnaire that has been used in the PRYM to assess prosocial behaviour (to compare resilience scores), conduct problems, and peer relationship problems (both to assess levels of youth risk).

• Youth Services Survey (YSS, used in the Macro Evaluation of the Comprehensive Children's Mental Health grants) which assesses a youth’s satisfaction with services as a whole over a specified time period.

• National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth Brief Questionnaire (NLSCY) which provides a basis for concurrent validity and to “match” children in this study with a comparable cohort of youth in Canada. An adapted list of questions from the fourth and fifth cycles of the NLSCY (Social Program Information and Analysis Directorate, Strategic Policy, Human Resources Development Canada and the Special Surveys Division, Statistics Canada) has been used to measure peer activity, the nature of parental or guardian-youth relationships, and academic aspirations.

• A 12-item version of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, (CES-D-12-NLSCY), validated for use with the NLSCY (Poulin, Hand and Boudreau, 2005), to measure levels of depression amongst participants. This measure, which compares favorably to other depression measures such as the BDI (see for example, Wilcox, Field, Prodromidis & Scafidi, 1998) was included largely for its appropriateness to this study since The CES-D-12-NLSCY has been validated for youth in the same Atlantic Canadian provinces as those in which this study was taking place. Moreover, the instrument’s use in the NLSCY provides a comparison basis for our own findings.

• Subscales of the 4HSQ, from the 4-H study of Positive Youth Development (Phelps, Balsano, Fay, Peltz, Zimmerman, Lerner & Lerner, 2007; Theokas & Lerner, 2006) to establish levels of delinquency and risk, as well as civic engagement through volunteering activities and/or paid work.

To review a copy of the PRYM, or to inquire about partnerships with the RRC, please email us at rrc@dal.ca.