Psychological resilience promotion –Quality assessment of intervention studies

Abstract

Stress resilience is considered an important condition for mental health and, in the recent years, measures of psychological resilience promotion have increasingly been developed and implemented. To facilitate an evidence-based practice, it is necessary to evaluate the quality of empirical findings on the effects of resilience interventions. This is done, for example, as part of systematic reviews, which contain critical study appraisal as a central task within the review process. However, considering the differences in resilience concepts, research designs and in quality criteria for intervention studies, quality assessment poses a lot of challenges. The paper focuses on the quality assessment of resilience intervention studies, especially on the assessment of the internal validity. In the first step, drawing on a search in theoretical and conceptual work, characteristic challenges for the appraisal of resilience intervention research are considered. In the second step, a set of decisive quality criteria for study assessment is shown, which emerge from the insights gained from two previous systematic reviews conducted by the author. The paper illustrates quality assessment requires accurately planning and a bunch of decisions regarding the evaluation procedure. The set of quality criteria presented provides guidance for the appraisal of empirical results on the efficacy of resilience measures as well as for the development of valid intervention studies on psychological resilience.