Abstract
<p>The Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) is among the most widely used measures of psychological resilience. Researchers increasingly categorize respondents as low, normal, or high resilience using fixed cutpoints (&lt;3.00 / 3.00–4.30 / &gt;4.30). Yet the origin of these cutpoints is rarely traced: they have spread through the literature largely detached from their source and their authors' intended use. We reviewed 32 studies that categorized BRS scores, extracting the cutpoints used, the sources cited for them, category proportions, and sample means. For four studies reporting proportions without means, we calculated and validated an inverse normal estimation method to recover sample means (r = .992, mean absolute error = 0.10). Of 32 studies, 25 (78%) applied the fixed cutpoints, and 17 of those 25 (68%) attributed them to Smith et al. (2008), the original BRS validation paper, which contains no cutpoints. The actual source is Smith et al. (2013), a paywalled book chapter with 29 times fewer citations. Among fixed-cutpoint studies, low-resilience prevalence was almost perfectly predicted by the sample mean (r = −.988); the lower a sample's mean, the more respondents fell below the fixed threshold. In contrast, studies that derived cutpoints from their own mean and standard deviation, as Smith et al. (2013) intended, classified a stable 17–21% as low regardless of the mean. Smith et al. (2023) have since published updated norms based on 121 studies that shift the boundaries to &lt;2.67 and ≥4.00; no reviewed study used them. Fixed cutpoints make low-resilience prevalence a function of the sample mean instead of resilience. We recommend a dual approach: updated norms for absolute comparison, and sample-derived cutpoints for identifying low resilience within each sample.</p>