Measuring Everyday Resilience: Tools for Understanding How People Plan for and Navigate Emerging Life Challenges

About the Project

Summary

People vary widely in how they handle the everyday challenges of modern life. Some notice early warning signs, prepare for possible difficulties, and draw together support from family, services, peers, and digital systems. Others experience problems accumulating across different areas such as work, health, finances, relationships, or online environments. Although these differences are widely recognised, psychology lacks clear, developmentally sensitive tools for measuring how people organise themselves in the face of emerging pressures.

This PhD will address that gap by developing measures that capture how individuals manage unfolding, interconnected challenges. The project will examine how people recognise when difficulties in one part of life may spill into another, how they coordinate competing demands, and how they use formal and informal networks to keep daily life functioning. The goal is to create reliable, practical questionnaires and brief behavioural indicators that can be used in research, education, healthcare, and community settings.

A distinctive feature of the PhD is the scope to shape its applied emphasis. Depending on interests, the candidate may focus, for example, on young people managing school and online pressures, adults balancing caring and financial responsibilities, or families navigating rapid or unexpected change. This applied lens will guide item content, sampling, and interpretation.

Methodologically, the PhD will involve co-producing item pools with stakeholders; running cognitive interviews; piloting draft measures; and then conducting full psychometric validation, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance testing, reliability assessments, and, where appropriate, advanced techniques such as item response theory or differential item functioning.

By the end of the project, the PhD will deliver a set of robust, accessible tools that provide a concrete way to study how people deal with the complexities of modern life, supporting future research, policy development, and community-based practice.

Training Opportunities

The candidate will receive comprehensive training in psychometric scale development, including item writing, cognitive interviewing, pilot testing, and advanced quantitative methods such as exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance, and reliability estimation. They will gain experience working with adults, parents, teachers, and young people in community and educational settings, and will receive support in preregistration, open science practices, and high-quality reporting. The PhD will also offer opportunities for national conference presentations, publications, and collaboration with interdisciplinary partners.

Expected Outputs

The PhD is expected to deliver:

• new validated measures describing how people manage emerging life challenges;
• research papers suitable for submission to leading journals in psychology and related fields;
• practical guidance for educators, policymakers, and community practitioners on using the tools ethically and effectively.