Pathways to Resilience III: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture

Longitudinal Research on Resilience
Speaker: Fon van de Vijver
Change and growth are important parts of resilience. In this presentation I start with a brief history of the measurement of change and describe how in qualitative and quantitative approaches change has been studied. The common problem of both traditions is to identify change against a backdrop of stability: What has changed and what has remained the same over time? Notably the quantitative tradition has a rich history in measuring change. Starting from the fundamental problems as observed by Bereiter in 1963 (such as the unreliability of change scores), I will indicate how we have progressed. Particular attention will be paid to multilevel modeling as the most up-to-date procedure for modeling change. Examples will be drawn from the resilience literature to illustrate the basic problems and solutions.