The Role of Resilience Portfolios in Overcoming Trauma

This special issue offers a series of papers that use the resilience portfolio model (RPM) to explore multidimensional, strength-based approaches to resilience in a wide variety of communities. The field is urgently in need of research that helps identify the factors that help people thrive despite exposure to violence and other trauma. We need to know how people typically overcome victimization and other adverse experiences if we are going to improve intervention and minimize the global burden of trauma. The series of papers in this issue consider resilience portfolios across geographic locations, forms of violence and trauma, communities, and age groups. In this introduction, we synthesize key themes in four RPM domains: meaning making, regulatory, interpersonal, and environmental. We use these themes to describe a revised RPM and implications for future research and practices.