Some negative experiences during adolescence can jeopardize psychological adaptation throughout life. Therefore, promoting adolescent resilience is an important goal to prevent symptoms of psychopathology. The Resilience Portfolio Model puts forward a framework to understand how different strengths (classified into three dimensions: regulatory, interpersonal, and meaning-making) can help people adapt and even thrive. Through this lens, the current study examines post-traumatic growth after victimization and other adversities. Participants were 407 Spanish adolescents aged from 14 to 18 (79.6% indicated some exposure to adversity). After testing their psychometric adequacy, different measures of strengths, well-being, victimization, and adversity were included in a survey for analyzing their association with post-traumatic growth. Density (more intensity of strengths), diversity (more variety of strengths), and all strength dimensions discriminated between those who scored high or low in post-traumatic growth. While endurance, meaning-making density, and diversity of strengths predicted higher post-traumatic growth, a higher emotional regulation related to lower post-traumatic growth. The model offers a guide for analyzing and promoting resilience in adolescent populations, and a series of short tools for evaluating a broad set of strengths.
Keywords: adolescents; post-traumatic growth; resilience; victimization; well-being.