Resilience comprises those strengths of mind and character that tend to: (1) prevent psychological wounding in people facing adversity, (2) lessen symptom severity and speed recovery in those who stumble psychologically, and (3) facilitate growth and coping across the lifespan. Given the rising rates of stress-related mental illnesses, including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, gaining a better understanding of resilience is a critical challenge facing public health educators. This study investigated resilience and its correlates in two female cohorts who had experienced intensely distressing experiences, such as WWII, the Korean War, guerrilla warfare, and relocating to the U.S. Objectives: To explore the association between resilience and psychosocial variables of theoretical relevance such as self-esteem, optimism, religiousness, cultural interdependency (similar to social support), and belief in higher education in a population of elderly Korean women and their daughters whom had experienced extreme adversity. Methods: Surveys conducted with 199 elderly Korean women and 174 of their daughters in several community locations measured the aforementioned psychosocial variables, socio-demographic variables, and exposure to distressing events. Results: Both mothers and daughters experienced great adversities in their lives such as psychological and physical losses from war as well as current and past difficulties with relocation. In the mothers' bivariate correlations self-esteem, optimism, religiousness, and cultural interdependency were significantly correlated with resilience. In the mothers' logistic regression model, only self-esteem, optimism, and cultural interdependency were significant predictors of resilience. In the bivariate correlations for daughters education, length of time in the U.S., physical and psychological war-related adversities, current relocation difficulties, self-esteem, optimism, cultural interdependency, belief in education, and mothers' resilience were all significantly associated with daughters' resilience. In the daughters' logistic regression model, only age, entering age to the U.S., and self-esteem were significant predictors of resilience. Conclusions: In this sample, self-esteem, optimism, and cultural interdependency were correlated with resilience for both mothers and daughters. In both cohorts, self-esteem showed the strongest relationship to resilience in both bivariate correlations and the logistic regression analyses, contradicting the assumption that self-esteem is only important in Western cultures. Implications of these findings for health educators are discussed. Learning Objective: Learner will identify psychosocial and demographic correlates of resilience, the understanding of which might help inform future health education interventions to build resilience in high-risk populations.Keyword(s): disease prevention/wellness, health promotion, research