Risk and Resilience Assessment

Risk and resilience assessment is an ecological approach to understanding why some people exposed to adversity fare poorly while others do well, by identifying the risk factors that increase the likelihood of negative outcomes and the protective factors that buffer against them, across individual, family, and environmental levels. Articulated for social work by Mark Fraser and colleagues, it shifts assessment from cataloguing deficits to weighing the dynamic balance of vulnerabilities and strengths, and uses that balance to target interventions that reduce risk and bolster protection.