Research on resilience and its implications for tobacco prevention

The concept of resilience refers to successful developmental processes in children who grow up in stressful or high-risk environments. Protective factors that increase the likelihood of positive developmental outcomes, as identified by longitudinal studies, include personal-level characteristics of autonomy, self-regulation, and problem-solving skill; family characteristics of warm but demanding relationships with parents, high parental expectations, and affectionate bonds with other family members; and community characteristics of social support, effective schools, and the availability of opportunities at major life transition points. Challenges include several cross-study ambiguities in the fundamental concepts, as well as potential misapplications of this research by policymakers who believe that children can be made 'invulnerable' to environmental stressors. It is recommended that: (1) Researchers should seek to understand those cases that do not conform to predictive statistical models; clinically oriented, qualitative methodologies can be useful for this purpose. (2) Greater focus needs to be placed on identifying individual differences in children's attraction to tobacco and their motivations for use. (3) Tobacco use can be studied as an instrumental strategy on the part of adolescents for dealing with critical developmental tasks. (4) Understanding the development of stress and coping processes in children can shed light on their use of tobacco as a coping mechanism, particularly in later phases of the uptake process. Overall, the study of resilience suggests a broad lifespan view of development, in which tobacco use is just one aspect of adaptation to critical developmental tasks.