The utility of non-specific measures of resilience across the lifespan: An investigation of structural invariance across gender and age cohorts

Objective: This study evaluated the relationship between specific and non-specific types of resilience measures. It also examined the structural invariance of a resilience measure with health and personality characteristics between gender and age groups. Method: Participants were a community-based sample from the Personality and Total Health (PATH) Through Life study from Canberra, Australia. PATH comprises three age cohorts, and at the time of the current study, these cohorts were aged between 28-32, 48-52, and 48-52 years. Analyses included regression to estimate variance, and multiple group analysis tested structural invariance. Results: Several significant differences resulted in failure to support full structural invariance in the associations between resilience and health and personality characteristics across cohorts, and also between gender within each age group. Similarly, variance in resilience explained by the covariates ranged from 65% in the 20s to 44% in the 60s. Conclusion: To surmise, resilience appears to be a unique psychological construct, independent of other related factors, with different corollaries across the lifespan and between genders. This suggests that indirect measures of resilience are not as effective as compared with a resilience-specific measure.