Resilience in Adopted vs. Non-Adopted College Students

Indianapolis, IN

Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, stress, trauma, and tragedy (American Psychological Association, 2017). Previous research on resilience has tended to neglect college-aged students. There is conflicting evidence suggesting that adopted children and adults have lower levels of the components of resilience, including lower self-confidence and self-esteem. The purpose of this study was to examine resilience levels of adopted versus non-adopted college-aged students enrolled at Ball State University. According to Friends In Adoption, “adoption by its nature involves the experience of profound loss” (Pasquarello, 2017). Due to the “profound loss,” adopted students should have higher levels of resilience as a result of their overcoming this hardship. Therefore, I hypothesized that non-adopted students would have lower resilience levels than adopted students. A survey was distributed via Qualtrics in addition to adoption status students are answering questions on the Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008) along with the Perception of Academic Success Scale (Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015). As of February 9th there has been 130 participants have completed the survey. However there is still ongoing data collection for an additional 2 weeks. Findings will have implications for our understanding of the experiences of adopted individuals as well as resilience.