Above considerations on how to measure resilience imply that any resilience study must have a longitudinal element: even in the simplest scenario, there needs to be an assessment of mental health before and after adversity; and even if a mental health measure before adversity is not available (see above), the final assessment of mental health – needed to constate the final resilience outcome – should be performed in some temporal distance to the adversity.

An ideal study will be prospective (Kalisch et al., 2017).

Specific issues need to be considered in intervention studies (Chmitorz et al., 2017).