Profiles of Personal Resiliency in Youth Who Have Experienced Physical or Sexual Abuse

To determine whether children and adolescents (7-17 years old) who had experienced physical, sexual, or both types of abuse reflected distinct profiles of personal resiliency, we administered the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents (RSCA) to 250 youth. We performed cluster analyses with T scores for the RSCA Self-Mastery, Relatedness, and Emotional Reactivity scales, and four profiles of resiliency representing high (20%), average (28%), and slightly below-average (30%) resiliency, and high vulnerability (22%) were identified. The youth with the high vulnerability profile described themselves as more depressed and were rated by their parents as having more internalizing and externalizing problems than the youth with high resiliency. We propose different treatment approaches that might be used with youth representing each of the four different profiles.