Activities: Resilience, Posttraumatic Growth, and Positive Aging

Personal Development Interventions

Expressive writing

As demonstrated by Pennebaker’s powerful work on expressive writing (1997, 2004), you can engage in expressive writing to organize thoughts and emotions and help find meaning in tragic experiences. If you have experienced adversity and want to try the following exercise, please do so.

However, if the tragedy is too raw, you are advised to wait until you are emotionally ready to participate.

Choose and then write about a painful, distressing experience in detail. Take the next 15–30 minutes to write anything about this specific traumatic experience. Then continue for three consecutive days.

You may write about the same experience or another one if you wish.

Measurement Tools

Changes in Outlook Questionnaire (CiOQ)

(Joseph et al., 1993)

Directions

Printed below are some statements about your current thoughts and feelings following the event you described above. Please read each one and indicate, by circling one of the numbers beside each statement, how much you agree or disagree with it at the present time using the following scale:

1 Strongly disagree 2 Disagree 3 Disagree a little 4 Agree a little 5 Agree 6 Strongly agree

  1. I don’t look forward to the future anymore. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  2. My life has no meaning anymore. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  3. I no longer feel able to cope with things. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  4. I don’t take life for granted anymore. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  5. I value my relationships much more now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  6. I feel more experienced about life now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  7. I do not worry about death at all anymore. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  8. I live every day to the full now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  9. I fear death very much now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  10. I look upon each day as a bonus. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  11. I feel as if something bad is just waiting around the corner to happen. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  12. I am a more understanding and tolerant person now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  13. I have greater faith in human nature now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  14. I no longer take people or things for granted. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  15. I desperately wish I could turn back the clock to before it happened. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  16. I sometimes think it’s not worth being a good person. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  17. I have very little trust in other people now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  18. I feel very much as if I’m in limbo. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  19. I have very little trust in myself now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  20. I feel harder towards other people. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  21. I am less tolerant of others now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  22. I am much less able to communicate with other people. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  23. I value other people more now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  24. I am more determined to succeed in life now. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  25. Nothing makes me happy anymore. 1 2 3 4 5 6
  26. I feel as if I’m dead from the neck downwards. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Scoring

The scale is a summative score. Please reverse score the following items:

1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26.

Interpretation

Scores can range from 26 to 150. A higher score indicates greater levels of change.

Review

Currently, the CiOQ and the PTGI are the most used tools within PTG research. The CiOQ is a retrospective self-report measurement tool that assesses positive and negative changes following trauma. The measurement tools and methodologies for assessing PTG have been scrutinized recently (Ford, Tennen, and Albert, 2008). The field must create less fallible modes of inquiry (Linley and Joseph, 2009).