  Within the resonance chiral effective theory we study the dressed propagators
of the spin-1 fields, as arise from a Dyson-Schwinger resummation
perturbatively constructed from loop diagrams with absorptive contributions in
the s-channel. We apply the procedure to the vector pion form factor and the
elastic pion-pion scattering to obtain the off-shell width of the rho_0 meson.
We adopt a definition of the off-shell width of spin-1 meson resonances that
satisfies the requirements of analyticity, unitarity, chiral symmetry and
asymptotic behaviour ruled by QCD. To fulfil these constraints the resummation
procedure cannot consist only of self-energy diagrams. Our width definition is
shown to be independent of the formulation used to describe the spin-1 meson
resonances.
