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The Rugged Resilience Measure: Development and Preliminary Validation of a Brief Measure of Personal Resilience

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Abstract

There is an increasing demand for brief measures of resilience that can distinguish different dimensions of successful adaptation and good quality of life despite the experience of atypical stress. We sought to develop a short measure of resilience that focuses specifically on psychological protective factors associated with resilience. From a review of existing measures of resilience, a list of protective psychological factors associated with good quality of life in contexts of adversity was compiled. A Delphi approach was employed to identify the most important factors, which were used to create the 10-item Rugged Resilience Measure (RRM). A sample of 5880 individuals (aged 16–29 years) from seven countries was then surveyed to investigate the psychometric properties of the measure. Analysis of the data involved exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance and alignment tests. A one-factor model was identified and confirmed to have good fit to the overall sample as well as equivalence across sex and country subgroups. The measure demonstrated good internal reliability (α = .87; ωh = .83) and concurrent validity through significant correlations with a measure of social-ecological resilience (ARM-R: r = .68) and predictive validity with a measure of social anxiety (SIAS: r = −.29). Evidence is also presented for its convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity. The RRM is a concise and potentially robust measure of personal resilience that works well in different contexts around the world. It may be used to assess internal protective factors or employed concurrently with assessments of social-ecological factors to provide a more holistic account of resilience and an individual’s quality of life.

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Availability of Data and Material

The study data is available at the following link: https://osf.io/dpqte/; DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/DPQTE.

Code Availability

The script used in the analyses is available from the lead author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the role of Edelman Intelligence for collecting the data and Unilever and CLEAR for funding and commissioning the overarching project as part of their mission to support the resilience of young people experiencing social anxiety.

Funding

No funding was received to conduct the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Resilience Research Centre, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Philip Jefferies, Rena Vanstone & Michael Ungar

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  1. Philip Jefferies
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  2. Rena Vanstone
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  3. Michael Ungar
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Contributions

MU and PJ 42 devised the study. PJ conducted analyses of the data and provided a first draft of the manuscript. RV and MU provided further content and significant revisions of the manuscript. All authors approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philip Jefferies.

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Dalhousie University Research Ethics Board approved the secondary analysis of the dataset.

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Participants provided informed consent to take part in the original data collection.

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Participants provided consent for their data to be used for various purposes including research.

Conflicts of Interest/Competing Interests

The lead author is employed on a Fellowship scheme which is jointly funded by an academic institution and an industry partner, the latter of which is associated with the organisation who collected the data. Both entities (academic institution and industry partner) provide the funding for the fellowship but do not direct or influence any studies undertaken by the researcher.

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Jefferies, P., Vanstone, R. & Ungar, M. The Rugged Resilience Measure: Development and Preliminary Validation of a Brief Measure of Personal Resilience. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 985–1000 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-021-09953-3

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