Developing Resilience Skills and Social Competence in Youth in a School Setting

Enhancing resilience is valuable to youth from economically marginalized communities given that they often face greater challenges and hardships than their peers from more affluent communities.

Efforts to increase resilience skills in these youth are hampered because they disproportionately encounter barriers in access to mental health interventions. Implementing school-based services may be optimal to address these inequalities. This project explores the effectiveness of a school-based group intervention (the Resilience Builder Program®) related to resilience and academic functioning in a sample of children from economically marginalized communities. Students (N = 169) with social-emotional difficulties were recruited from five elementary schools and randomly assigned to participate in the Resilience Builder Program® (RBP) immediately or following a semester delay. Participants, their parents, and teachers completed measures of resilience and academic functioning. Repeated-measures analysis of variance compares groups across time (pre-, post-intervention) on psychosocial and academic outcomes.