CD-RISC: 25 statements about handling what comes
Resilience is a word that means everything and nothing. Connor and Davidson made it concrete in 2003 by writing 25 statements about how people handle setbacks and asking them to rate each one from 0 (not true at all) to 4 (true nearly all the time). The total runs 0 to 100, higher is better, and nothing is reverse scored.
The instruction matters more than usual here. You are asked about the past month, and if something did not happen, you answer as you think you would have reacted. That makes the scale a mix of memory and self-prediction, which is worth remembering when the number comes out high or low.
Five factors, then one
The original analysis produced five: ability and hardiness (8 items), tolerance of negative affect (7), positive acceptance of change (5), control (3), and spiritual influences (2). Connor and Davidson later said the factor structure does not hold up across samples and advised against scoring the factors separately. Campbell-Sills and Stein (2007) went further and built a 10-item single-factor version, which is now common in survey research.
In Chinese community samples the structure came out as three factors instead: tenacity (13 items), strength (8), and optimism (4), explaining 45.01% of the variance. Yu and Zhang (2007) noted that control and spiritual influences did not emerge as separate dimensions in their data, which is a reasonable hint that resilience is partly defined by culture.
What different groups average
| Group | Mean (SD) | N |
|---|---|---|
| US general population | 80.4 (12.8) | 458 |
| US primary care patients | 71.8 | 139 |
| Psychiatric outpatients | 68.0 | |
| Generalized anxiety disorder | 62.4 | 24 |
| PTSD samples | 47.8 to 52.8 | 22 |
| Chinese community sample | 65.4 (13.9) | 560 |
| Hong Kong general population | 60.0 (13.9) | 10,997 |
| Portuguese community sample | 73.4 (12.0) | 421 |
| Adults in treatment for opioid use | 75.82 (15.78) | 403 |
The spread is the interesting part. A person with PTSD and a person in the general population can differ by 30 points on the same scale, and the Chinese and Hong Kong averages sit well below the US one. Comparing your score against a foreign norm will mislead you, which is why the bands below are descriptive labels rather than diagnostic ones.
Reliability
Internal consistency for the 25-item version runs 0.89 to 0.93 across translations, and the 10-item version runs 0.81 to 0.92. Retest reliability at two weeks was 0.87 in the original work, and the 10-item version held at 0.81 over six months in older German women. The Chinese version reported a total of 0.91, with subscale alphas of 0.88 for tenacity, 0.80 for strength, and 0.60 for optimism. That last number is low enough that the four optimism items should not carry much weight on their own.
Reading a score
| Total | Reading |
|---|---|
| 0-55 | Low resilience |
| 56-73 | Below average |
| 74-82 | Average |
| 83-90 | Above average |
| 91-100 | High resilience |
These bands follow the quartiles of the US general population sample, where 74 to 82 sits at the middle. They are a description of where you fall, not a verdict about how you will cope with the next bad thing.
Shorter versions
The 10-item version scores 0 to 40 and averaged 31.8 (SD 5.4) with a median of 32 in a US community sample of 764. The 2-item version scores 0 to 8 and averaged 6.91 (SD 1.5) with a median of 7 in a US sample of 458; in a Hong Kong sample of 10,997 the median was 5. Short versions are cheaper to run and lose the fine detail, which is usually the right trade for a large survey and the wrong one for a single person trying to understand themselves.
What it correlates with
Higher scores go with greater hardiness (r = 0.68 with the Kobasa measure) and with lower perceived stress (r = -0.55 in one sample of people with chronic illness). In Chinese community samples, resilience correlated 0.49 with self-esteem and 0.48 with life satisfaction. In 403 adults in treatment for opioid use disorder, the correlation with depression was -0.237 and with addiction severity -0.148, so the scale is measuring something broader than mood. Scores also move after trauma-focused treatment, which is what you would hope for from a measure meant to track recovery.
What this page is not
Resilience is not a fixed trait and a low score is not a character flaw. It shifts with sleep, support, health, and what is currently happening in your life. The scale is also copyrighted, and permission is needed for most uses beyond research. If you are in the middle of something hard, a score is far less useful than a conversation with someone trained to help. This page is not a diagnosis and does not replace one.