Advancing Daily Resilience Measures in Experience Sampling Studies: Co-Creation, Development, and Validation with Youth

Resilience, defined as adaptation to or recovery from stressors, is a marker of mental health and well-being. While often studied in the context of major life events, much less is known about daily resilience in response to daily stressors. One reason is the lack of validated measures that capture daily resilience in daily life. In this study, we developed and evaluated different types of daily resilience measures in collaboration with adolescents and young adults.Twenty-one youth (mean age = 20.1 years, 81% female) participated in co-creation sessions to develop and refine daily resilience items. Subsequently, 52 participants (mean age = 19.5 years, 83% female) tested these items using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), completing five surveys per day over seven days (1,371 total observations). We evaluated reliability and convergent/divergent validity using well-known resilience factors, including daily affect, optimism, stress, productivity, and social context.Based on information from the co-creation sessions, four daily resilience measures were included: (1) self-reported daily resilience, (2) data-driven affective recovery, (3) outcome-based (residual) resilience, and (4) drawing-based affective recovery. All measures showed meaningful variability over time. Self-reported and outcome-based resilience demonstrated good reliability and strong associations with resilience-related factors, supporting their validity. In contrast, affective recovery measures showed weaker and less consistent associations.Our findings demonstrate that daily resilience can be meaningfully assessed in daily life. Combining youth perspectives with intensive longitudinal data provides a promising framework to better understand how resilience operates moment-to-moment, offering important insights into intervention and prevention strategies.