Resilience in Autism and Intellectual Disability: a Systematic Review

Resilience remains under-researched in childhood disability. This review synthesized the available literature on resilience in children with autism and/or intellectual disability (ID), with a focus on the measurement of resilience across the eight studies that met inclusion criteria. Questionnaires were commonly used to assess resilience, with a lack of consistency in the measures used across studies. This review highlights the need for work to seek to understand how resilience presents in childhood disability, and how it can be reliably assessed in children with autism and/or ID. Reliable assessment of resilience is necessary to identify the internal and external factors that can protect children from adversities to improve learning and developmental outcomes.