CD-RISC-10 Resilience Score

CD-RISC-10 resilience score

The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale — 10 items (CD-RISC-10) is the short form of the original 25-item CD-RISC, trimmed down by Campbell-Sills & Stein (2007). You rate each item on a 0–4 Likert scale (from not true at all up to true nearly all the time), then add them up: Score = Σ item_i (i = 1..10), which lands somewhere between 0 to 40. The higher the score, the more psychological resilience — roughly, how well someone feels they can bounce back from adversity.

Psychometrically the instrument holds up well, with Cronbach's α usually landing around 0.85–0.90 and a single-factor structure across most populations. Solano et al. (2016) published the Brazilian Portuguese validation, which backs its use in clinical and research settings here.

Applications

It gets used across trauma research, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), coping with chronic illness, occupational health and burnout, pediatric oncology, military psychology, and positive-psychology interventions. Resilience-training programs and mindfulness studies also lean on it as an outcome measure.

FAQ

Is there an official cutoff? There's no universal cutoff, since norms shift from one population to another. For a ballpark, US community samples average about 32, while clinical PTSD samples usually come in under 25.

Can it replace the 25-item version? For screening and large-scale studies, yes. The CD-RISC-10 correlates >0.92 with the full CD-RISC-25 and takes less time to administer.

Is it a diagnostic tool? No. Resilience is a trait or process, not a disorder, so the score is meant to sit alongside a clinical assessment rather than stand in for one.