University-Community Collaboration to Create a Toolkit to Measure Protective Factors: Balancing Rigor and Utility to Build Community Resilience

Introduction: Resilience is a positive outcome in the face of adversity (Luther et al., 2000). Communities can build resilience through collective impact efforts that build protective factors among individuals and families (Chaskin, 2008). Shared measurement is a key condition of collective impact (Hanleybrown et al., 2012); yet, establishing shared measurement across sectors as diverse as health, mental health, social services, education, and business, is enormously challenging. Even the field of prevention science struggles to find valid, agreed-upon measures (Counts et al., 2010). Communities are therefore left without the measurement tools they need. The current project is helping to close this gap. Through a partnership between a local collective impact initiative and a university we are developing a measurement toolkit for individual-, relational-, and community-level protective factors that can be utilized community-wide across sectors.

Methods: Leaders from a local collective impact initiative focused on promoting resilience community-wide collaborated with university researchers to develop a measurement toolkit which included: general protective factors, and specific individual-, relational- and community-level protective factors. Library databases (e.g., PsycTests) and existing measurement compendia were examined to identify measures in the four categories that appeared to be appropriate and relevant to the community. Measures were compiled into a toolkit to make it easy for community partners to measure protective factors that were most applicable to their work. To realize the vision of shared measurement, we also identified a small number of core items common across multiple measures to pilot test across sectors.

Results: The toolkit summarizes each protective factor measure (e.g., number of items, subscale(s), reporting agent, literacy level, language, psychometrics, permissions, etc.) for a lay audience. It includes four tables: 1.) General resilience/multiple protective factors (~15 measures), 2.) Individual-level (~50 measures), 3.) Relational-level (~55 measures), and 4.) Community-level protective factors (~24 measures). In addition 8 core items were selected to examine resilience promoting factors cross sectors.

Conclusions: “Protective factors benefit all families, help build positive relationships with service providers, and draw on natural support systems that contribute to long term success” (Counts et al., 2010). Nevertheless, it can be difficult and time consuming for community partner agencies to find appropriate measurement tools. This strengths-based, collaborative effort resulted in a collection of questionnaires and a core set of items that could be implemented in the local context--balancing rigor and utility. Lessons learned will be discussed that may be useful to researchers, community partners and developing partnerships.