The resilience, or capacity to recover and to maintain an adaptative
behavior after of suffering an intense stress, catastrophe, or traumatic
experiences like bad treatments, violence, etc., it has been related with a
great number of problem behaviors, like it is the consumption of alcohol
and of other drugs.
In the present study we analyzed the resilience in relation with the
consumption of alcohol (wine, beer, spirits) in a sample of 1.144 people
of 14 to 25 years old, representative of two areas of Galicia (Spain), O
Salnés (Pontevedra) and O Carballiño (Ourense), the fi rst dinamic and
in the coast and the second in the interior and based in the agriculture.
The assessment of the resilience was made with the Resilience Scale of
Wagnild and Young that evaluate resilience and the factors of personal
compence and aceptation of self and life.
The results of the study allow to confi rm the hipothesis partly because
that people that don’t consume alcohol have a bigger score in resilience.
This relation appears in the scale of aceptation of self and life but less in
that of personal competence and in the general scale of resilience. Where appears the relation was in the consumption of spirits. In this case those
that have the biggest score in resilience, or in their derived scales of
personal competence and aceptation of self and life, is those that don’t
drink or they drink a little. They have differences in the results for the
ages considered in the study (14-17, 18-21 and 22-25 years), although
not for sex.
These results indicate the utility of the construct of resilience to
explain the consumption of alcohol and their potentiality to be used in
the preventive programs at school, family and community level.