Reverse-engineering psychological resilience: A review and quantitative evaluation of psychometric instruments used in resilience research.

Discussions on what psychological resilience is, its operationalizations, and approaches to measuring it have occupied the scientific community for decades. This manuscript (1) provides an overview of psychometric methods used to assess resilience, including key characteristics, and (2) evaluates resilience scales through a preregistered, content-analytical evaluation of items based on expert ratings. Items from 83 resilience scales were empirically categorized using a literature-based framework with three main categories (resilience as a process, traits, and environmental factors) and 12 corresponding subcategories. Across all scales, 31.79% of items reflected resilience as a process, 51.95% reflected five-factor model traits, and 16.26% reflected environmental factors. An additional analysis weighted results according to citation frequency, showing how operationalizations influence the current research practice: From this perspective, 60.17% of the items relate to process-related content, 34.59% to trait-related content, and 5.24% to environment-related content. This weighting reflects the prevalence and influence of specific scales in the field. The inter-rater agreement across four raters was κ = .68. Overall, existing questionnaires predominantly cover trait-based content, whereas widely used instruments tend to operationalize resilience as a dynamic process. We derive conceptually grounded recommendations for scale selection to improve clarity and comparability in future research.