Measures of Resilience: Do They Reflect the Experiences of Transgender Individuals?

Resilience is often viewed as the ability to bounce back from challenges. This conceptualization tends to be individualistic and can be less fitting for marginalized communities. Research with transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals has shown that resilience can manifest in various ways, such as developing pride in one’s identity, connection to a TGD community, or advocating against oppression. Given these conflicting views, we sought to (1) describe common themes in TGD people’s experience of resilience by pooling information from qualitative research; and (2) evaluate how well quantitative measures of resilience reflected the ways that TGD people define resilience in qualitative research. We reviewed articles published from January 2010 to January 2020. Our search for research on resilience in TGD samples revealed 33 quantitative articles and 17 qualitative articles. We developed a codebook from the qualitative articles by retrieving information about themes from these past studies (e.g., developing motivation and agency, pride or positive self-image). We also reviewed the quantitative studies and retrieved the measures used to assess resilience, followed by coding these scales to understand whether the themes from the qualitative data were reflected in the quantitative measures of resilience. Overall, themes related to social support were common across the measures. However, other themes were not reflected in any measures, such as self-definition of gender, hope, and self-advocacy. Our research demonstrates the discrepancy between qualitative research on TGD resilience and quantitative measurement of resilience. Measure development that more fully reflects TGD people’s experiences is key to advancing this research.