Which statement best differentiates resilience from coping strategies in psychosocial wellbeing?

• A. Coping strategies are broad capacities to adapt across many challenges.
• B. Coping strategies are specific methods to manage a stressor; resilience is the broader capacity to adapt, rebound, and maintain functioning across challenges over time.
• C. Coping and resilience are the same.
• D. Resilience refers only to physical health.

Answer: (B)

Coping strategies are specific tools used to manage a particular stressor, while resilience is the broader, ongoing capacity to adapt, rebound, and maintain functioning across challenges over time. Coping methods target how you handle a single situation—choosing problem-solving steps or strategies to regulate emotions in that moment. Resilience involves sustaining adaptive functioning across multiple events, drawing on protective factors like social support, self-efficacy, and flexibility, and it unfolds as a dynamic process over time. This distinction is why the statement is the best fit: coping strategies are specific, time-limited responses to a stressor, whereas resilience is the enduring ability to bounce back and continue functioning as challenges accumulate. The other options miss this difference: coping is not broad across many challenges, they are not the same, and resilience is not limited to physical health.