Speaker
Description
Resilience is increasingly viewed as an essential capacity for students navigating high-stakes, examination-oriented education systems, yet little is known about how it is distributed among Vietnamese adolescents. This study examined the level and internal structure of the Adversity Quotient (AQ) among high school students in Hanoi, and tested whether AQ varies by gender, grade level, and parental educational attainment. An adapted Adversity Response Profile was administered to 236 students (104 male, 132 female) across Grades 10 to 12 at a selective public high school. The four CORE subscales: Control, Ownership, Reach, and Endurance demonstrated good to excellent internal consistency. Most students scored in the moderately low to moderate range, with Reach emerging as the weakest dimension: over a third were classified as Low, indicating a pronounced tendency for setbacks in one domain to spill over into others. Male students scored significantly higher than female students on Control, Reach, Endurance, and total AQ, with small effect sizes; notably, no gender difference emerged on Ownership. Grade-level differences were non-significant except on Ownership, where Grade 10 students exceeded Grade 12 students. Crucially, neither paternal nor maternal education was associated with AQ at any level, a null result robust across correlational and non-parametric tests. These findings characterise a resilience profile shaped more by gendered socialisation than by family cultural capital, qualifying the transferability of Bourdieusian cultural-capital theory within a Confucian-heritage, exam-meritocratic setting.
Keywords: adversity quotient; resilience; gender differences; cultural capital; Vietnamese education
