How can anyone oppose initiatives to improve students' mental and physical health, their "resilience"? The problem is that such goals are too vague to allow assessment whether committing resources to them is justified in terms of cost effectiveness. In the UK, as elsewhere, vague goals goals such as these have given rise to positive psychology resilience programs that are costly and ineffective, both financially and in terms of the commitment of student and staff time. But the unsubstantiated enthusiasm for such programs allows them to continue to proliferate and consume resources.
Available evidence, to the extent to which it is generated at all, suggested such programs are ineffective. The same can presumably be said about emotional coaching programs, except that they lack the rigorous evaluation needed to determine whether they are worthwhile. I challenge the author of the rapid response above, which advertises for the Melksham 0-19 Resilience Project emotional coaching program, to produce data that it has any benefits at all.
See my detailed critique of the UK resilience program [1] both in a blog post [2] and at PubMed Commons [3], neither of which promoters of the program have responded.
1. Challen, A. R., Machin, S. J., & Gillham, J. E. (2014). The UK Resilience Programme: A school-based universal nonrandomized pragmatic controlled trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical psychology, 82(1), 75
Rapid Response:
How can anyone oppose initiatives to improve students' mental and physical health, their "resilience"? The problem is that such goals are too vague to allow assessment whether committing resources to them is justified in terms of cost effectiveness. In the UK, as elsewhere, vague goals goals such as these have given rise to positive psychology resilience programs that are costly and ineffective, both financially and in terms of the commitment of student and staff time. But the unsubstantiated enthusiasm for such programs allows them to continue to proliferate and consume resources.
Available evidence, to the extent to which it is generated at all, suggested such programs are ineffective. The same can presumably be said about emotional coaching programs, except that they lack the rigorous evaluation needed to determine whether they are worthwhile. I challenge the author of the rapid response above, which advertises for the Melksham 0-19 Resilience Project emotional coaching program, to produce data that it has any benefits at all.
See my detailed critique of the UK resilience program [1] both in a blog post [2] and at PubMed Commons [3], neither of which promoters of the program have responded.
1. Challen, A. R., Machin, S. J., & Gillham, J. E. (2014). The UK Resilience Programme: A school-based universal nonrandomized pragmatic controlled trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical psychology, 82(1), 75
2. Coyne JC. Positive psychology in the schools: the UK Resilience Project. PLOS Blogs: Mind the Brain. November 25, 2013 http://blogs.plos.org/mindthebrain/2013/11/25/positive-psychology-in-the...
3.PMID: 24245805 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24245805#cm24245805_1378
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Competing interests: No competing interests