Risk, Vulnerability, and Resilience among Youth: In Search of a Conceptual Framework.

Most youth in America have a good chance of becoming productive members of adult society. However, for a particular group of young people, at-risk youth, the probability of maturing into responsible adulthood is less certain. "At-risk youth" is a term commonly used to describe those adolescents for whom there is a high probability (risk) of negative life events, because their demographic, individual, economic, or social characteristics predict that they are vulnerable. This paper reviews research on risk and resilience from two primary disciplines--developmental psychology/psychopathology and social demography/sociology. The paper is one piece of a larger research endeavor, "Pathways to Achievement Among At-Risk Youth," that focuses on socioeconomic achievements among disadvantaged adolescents. The review briefly summarizes research approaches, operationalizations, and key findings from the two research traditions. The goal of the review is to highlight consistencies across disciplines in hopes of developing a coherent framework that can be used to study resilient behavior among at-risk youth. From this interdisciplinary perspective, the paper attempts to extract a more comprehensive list of both risk and protective factors, and a sense of the range of options in operationalizing these variables. The paper concludes by integrating these findings into a new conceptual framework for understanding resilience among disadvantaged youth. (Contains 51 references.) (EV)