Occupational resilience: Scoping review of conceptualisations and applications in contexts of adversity.
Gema Puig-Esteve, Rodolfo Morrison
PMID 42410974WHAT IT FOUND
Occupational resilience is mostly studied as workers' capacity to withstand job stress, not as people using meaningful everyday activity to rebuild life after trauma.
The authors argue for the broader second reading.
Key findings
01Across the 37 included studies, occupational resilience is mostly understood as a work-based idea: how people in jobs withstand stress tied to their work. That framing comes from occupational health and organisational psychology, and it contrasts with occupational therapy's broader sense of meaningful everyday activity.
02The studies split between two readings: occupational resilience as a measurable, relatively stable individual trait or personal resource, and as a changing process that emerges from the ongoing interaction between a person, their occupations and their environments.
03The authors put forward their own definition: occupational resilience is the process by which people, groups and communities use and transform meaningful occupations after adversity to reduce suffering and rebuild purpose, agency and participation. They argue that for people exposed to trauma, occupation-based work should be explicitly trauma-informed rather than generic stress-management or work-resilience training.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The authors did not appraise the quality of the included studies, so a weak study carries the same weight in the themes as a strong one. The search covered five databases plus limited grey literature, in three languages and from 2000 onwards, so relevant work in other languages or sources may be missing. The authors state that their own review lumps together very different levels of adversity, and that many studies treated ordinary work stress as trauma. That makes it hard to know which findings apply to clients with serious trauma. The concept is used across psychology, public health, education and management, not only occupational therapy, so occupational therapy-specific meanings may be diluted in the synthesis. No service users or community members were involved in designing or interpreting the review. The picture reflects published work only up to the final search in late 2025.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. They report using AI tools: DeepL and similar programs to translate parts of the manuscript from Spanish into English, Rayyan AI to help screen references without replacing human decisions, and NotebookLM and Gemini to draft some diagrams and figures, all of which the authors reviewed and take responsibility for.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that any occupational therapy intervention builds resilience. It maps how the term is used across the studies reviewed, and the authors did not appraise the quality of a single one of them, so nothing here shows that a treatment works.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →