Scale library · Psychology & mental health
Brief Resilience Scale (BRS): Smith et al. (2008)
The BRS was developed by Smith et al. (2008) to measure the ability to bounce back, that is to recover from stress and adversity, in line with the original meaning of resilience. Unlike scales of the resources that help people be resilient, it asks directly whether respondents recover quickly or slowly. It has 6 items, 3 positively and 3 negatively worded, alternating. It suits theses on academic stress, burnout and mental health after adverse events, and as a mediator or moderator between stress and outcomes.
Cite the original, not the blog.
- Model or scale: BRS
- Constructs: 1
- Items: 6 (3 reverse-coded)
Original English items
Items marked (R) are reverse-coded: recode them before computing reliability or scale scores. Replace bracketed placeholders such as [system] with the name of the system, brand or organization you study.
Resilience (ability to bounce back) (BRS, 6 items)
| Code | Item wording | Reverse-coded |
|---|---|---|
| BRS1 | I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times | No |
| BRS2 (R) | I have a hard time making it through stressful events | Yes |
| BRS3 | It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event | No |
| BRS4 (R) | It is hard for me to snap back when something bad happens | Yes |
| BRS5 | I usually come through difficult times with little trouble | No |
| BRS6 (R) | I tend to take a long time to get over set-backs in my life | Yes |
Response scale
5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly agree). Reverse-score BRS2, BRS4 and BRS6 (1 becomes 5, 2 becomes 4, 3 stays, 4 becomes 2, 5 becomes 1), then average the 6 items for a score of 1 to 5; higher scores mean greater resilience.
Recoding reverse-coded items: 1–5 scale: new score = 1 + 5 − score = 6 − score.
Licence and permission
According to the PhenX Toolkit (NIH), the BRS protocol is freely available and needs no permission. Cite the original article by Smith et al. (2008).
Sources (APA 7)
- Smith, B. W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., & Bernard, J. (2008). The brief resilience scale: Assessing the ability to bounce back. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 15(3), 194–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705500802222972
Vietnamese translation
A Vietnamese translation of every item, with sample-size advice and studies that used the scale, is on the Vietnamese page for this scale.