Resilience may be viewed as a measure of stress coping ability and, as such, could be an important target of treatment in anxiety, depression, and stress reactions. We describe a new rating scale to assess resilience. The Connor-Davidson
Resilience scale (CD-RISC) comprises of 25 items, each rated on a 5-point scale (0–4), with higher scores reflecting greater resilience. The scale was administered to subjects in the following groups: community sample, primary
care outpatients, general psychiatric outpatients, clinical trial of generalized anxiety disorder, and two clinical trials of PTSD. The reliability, validity, and factor analytic structure of the scale were evaluated, and reference scores for
study samples were calculated. Sensitivity to treatment ef fects was examined in subjects from the PTSD clinical trials. The scale demonstrated good psychometric properties and factor analysis yielded five factors. A repeated measures ANOVA showed that an increase in CD-RISC score was associated with greater improvement during treatment. Improvement in CD-RISC score was noted in proportion to overall clinical global improvement, with greatest
increase noted in subjects with the highest global improvement and deterioration in CD-RISC score in those with minimal or no global improvement. The CDRISC has sound psychometric properties and distinguishes between those with
greater and lesser resilience. The scale demonstrates that resilience is modifiable and can improve with treatment, with greater improvement corresponding to higher levels of global improvement. Depression and Anxiety 18:76–82, 2003.
& 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.