Since hardiness is defined as the personality characteristic that allows an individual to remain optimistic and healthy after a stressful life experience, it is important to determine how this may relate to age of an individual. As evidence of the relationship between age and resilience comes to the foreground, we may more easily understand how some cope with stressful life events while others find it more difficult to cope. Schmied and Lawler, (1986) published a study to examine the impact of hardiness, Type A personality, and stress on women working as secretaries. Demographics related to age, education and marital status, number of children, race, and religion were also considered, but this section will focus only on the age and robustness findings. The sample for this study was a group of female secretaries, aged between twenty-one and fifty-nine. One hundred and ten questionnaires were sent, with a response rate of 74.5%, for a final sample of eighty-two women. Every woman was required to have at least two years of college education. Hardiness was measured using five standard questionnaires, divided into three subcomponents of hardiness. The alienation from work scale and the alienation from self scale were used to measure commitment, the security scale was used to measure challenge and finally the external locus of control scale and the helplessness scale were used to measure the control aspect of resistance. The score from each scale was converted to a z score and then summed to provide a single resistance score. The higher the score, the less robustness is possessed for all scales. It is important to note that the challenge scale was doubled as there was only one scale…half of the paper…and hardiness relationship. For future research, in addition to exclusively looking for a relationship between age and hardiness, it would be feasible to include a sample of men since the studies presented above only describe women. Works Cited Rich, V. L., & Rich, AR (1987). Personality resistance and burnout in female staff nurses. Consulting Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 19(2), 63-66. doi: 10.1111/j.1547-5069.1987.tb00592.xRhodewalt, F., & Zone, J. B. (1989). Evaluation of life change, depression, and illness in resistant and nonresistant women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(1), 81-88. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.81 Schmied, L. A., & Lawler, K. A. (1986). Hardiness, type of behavior and stress-illness relationship in working women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(6), 1218-1223. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.51.6.1218