Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Resilience Scale Short form in a Portuguese Adolescent Sample

Abstract

The Resilience Scale (Wagnild & Young, 1993) was developed to assess one's resilience levels. The purpose of the present study is to corroborate the unifactorial structure of the Resilience Scale short version for adolescents (Pinheiro & Matos, 2013) proposed by Wagnild (2009), to explore its reliability and to analyze the association between resilience and depressive symptoms in a Portuguese sample. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed in a sample of 308 adolescents, female (n= 167) and male (n=141) with ages ranged between 12 and 17 years (M= 13.77; SD= 1.142). The CFA that was conducted led to the construction of a 12 item scale and replicated the one factor solution. The Cronbach's alpha that was obtained revealed to be good (.87). Results showed that resilience was negatively related with depression and is predictive of depressive symptomatology. However, the percentage of explained variance was low. The original one-dimensional structure of the RS short form was confirmed. The results also support that resilience seems to be a protective factor concerning depressive symptoms. Adolescents who obtained higher resilience scores showed lower degrees of depressive symptomatology. These findings can be important for the development of interventions that aim to prevent and treat depression and other psychopathological problems in the adolescent population.