Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jan 2, 2025
Date Accepted: Jun 12, 2025
The influence of personal traits, social relationships, and external resources on the development of emotional resilience in children from East London: Protocol for an observational accelerated longitudinal cohort study.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Emotional resilience is a dynamic process by which individuals may prevent, overcome, and thrive following challenging events. Emotional resilience can be defined as absence of negative outcomes (i.e. symptoms of psychopathology) and/or the presence of adaptive outcomes (i.e. well-being). Despite the wealth of research tracking the nature of and contributions to emotional resilience in adolescence and adulthood, there is a dearth of evidence on the nature of resilience and its development during pre-adolescent childhood despite this being an important preventative period for later mental health difficulties, and a period when emotional experiences change.
Objective:
Our primary study objectives are threefold: to explore how pre-adolescent children growing up in deprived areas of London may operationalise “resilience”; evaluate whether there are differences in the development or trajectories of resilience among our target population; and understand what contributes to resilience pathways over time. Additionally, our research aims to better understand the psychometric properties of resilience measures used in a pre-adolescent sample and assess the feasibility of developing a longitudinal cohort study of pre-adolescent children in East London.
Methods:
We will conduct an accelerated longitudinal cohort study in primary schools across the broad geographical area of East London. The multi-method approach will span across three data collection arms; child cognitive tasks and psychometric questionnaires in classroom settings, teacher ratings including teacher assessments of school mental health provisions, and parent questionnaires). We aim to recruit approximately 1200 children aged 7-11 at baseline across UK School Years 3, 4, and 5. Our measures will span themes of resilience and mental health, as well as personal, social, and community resources available to the children. We will collect quantitative data via questionnaires from children, their parents, and school staff. We will collect qualitative data from the children through paper-based tasks.
Results:
Study recruitment commenced in October 2022 until December 2023. Baseline testing commenced in October 2022 until December 2023. 873 students were enrolled at baseline. Follow-up is anticipated to continue at least annually until June 2027.
Conclusions:
This study will assess the feasibility of conducting a longitudinal cohort study of pre-adolescent children in East London. Alongside evaluating the psychometric properties of resilience measures used in this age group, this study will explore how resilience develops in children across time and relate this to other outcome measures. By identifying how personal, social, and community resources may impact on resilience in pre-adolescent children, we will enhance the understanding of how emotional resilience develops in pre-adolescent children and future studies will be able to develop interventions to boost resilience by targeting young and diverse populations. Clinical Trial: ISRCTN12430839
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Copyright
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