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Many thanks to Tytti Solantaus for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Norm Garmezy was one of the most important pioneers in the conceptualization and study of resilience from the early 1970s onward (Garmezy, 1974, 1985). Several features made his approach distinctive. First, in keeping with Eisenberg (1977), he viewed development as the unifying concept in the study of psychopathology. This was the central element in the field of developmental psychopathology that he did so much to advance (Rutter, 2008; Rutter & Garmezy, 1983). Two key elements defined developmental psychopathology: the focus on continuities and discontinuities over time, and continuities and discontinuities between normality and mental disorder (Rutter, 1986). It was notable that this involved no presumption that either continuities or discontinuities would predominate. Rather, testing constituted an essential part of the research endeavor.
Second, Garmezy was forthright in requiring a methodologically rigorous approach to data analysis (Garmezy, Masten, & Tellegen, 1984). Resilience should not constitute a theory, nor should it be seen as equivalent to positive psychology or competence. Both of the latter are valid and useful concepts (see Masten & Tellegen, 2012 [this issue]) but they differ from resilience. However, all require longitudinal study for their rigorous investigation; all need to consider multifactorial causal pathways; and all need to examine gene-environment interdependence.
Third, in his own research, Garmezy had been motivated by Bleuler's (1978) study of the children of mothers with schizophrenia, which showed that even in this high-risk group there were numerous examples of individuals who showed adaptive patterns of social behavior and work achievement. Garmezy appreciated that the high risk involved a genetic liability but, equally, he realized that being raised by a schizophrenic mother involved environmental as well as genetic risks (see Rutter, 1989, for a fuller discussion on this point). He decided that there was need to study stress resistance in high-risk groups but chose to focus on psychosocial disadvantage in community samples. In that connection, he was clear that risk and protective influences should not be defined on the basis of theoretical or ideological presumptions. Rather, the influences needed to be investigated systematically in order to understand how they actually operated in the samples under study. Moreover, it...