‘Resilience’ isn’t what we thought it was: a critical review of resilience as measured by the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory

The Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory identified the capability to persevere in the face of challenge as one of seven scales for self-assessment. For practical purposes the fragility and dependence scale was reversed and presented to users as resilience. The paper reports on a secondary analysis of data to explore the patterns and relationships between these seven scales with particular reference to the ‘fragility and dependence’ scale. The sample is a curated data set accumulated from research and development projects conducted between 2003 and 2012, N=54965. A sub group of 45 extreme cases from a Young Offenders institution is examined for explanatory purposes. Cluster analysis and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesis that ‘fragility and dependence’ should not understood as the opposite of ‘resilience’. The findings suggest that a low score on ‘fragility and dependence’ is better understood as emotional and cognitive ‘closedness’ to the inter- and intra-personal dynamics of learning power as a defence against external ‘threats’. This quality of being ‘closed’ or ‘open’ to the flow of learning is context dependent and can only be appropriately interpreted in the light of the relational context of the learner.