Development of an instrument on psychosocial adaptation for people living in a disaster-prone area

Abstract

BackgroundAdaptation is a process of adjusting to the current or expected climate change. The varied adverse outcomes enable people towards necessary adaptation. People living in disaster-prone areas go through a relatively higher frequency of emergencies and exigencies. Gradually people learn to cope with stress and over a while, they develop various strategies for adaptation. The ability to rapidly adapt to such changes helps people to better fit in the environment and prepare themselves for future emergencies. There is no instrument available to measure psychosocial adaptation objectively. The current study reports on the development and validation of psychosocial adaptation instrument. MethodsCross-sectional study design was adopted for the study. The study population consisted of people living in high-intensity hazard zones for cyclones, earthquakes, and floods in the Cuttack city of Odisha in India. The development of psychosocial adaptation instrument consisted of two phases. Content validity index, Kappa statistic, and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were measured. Adopting the multistage sampling method a total of 400 participants were selected using the KISH method and were interviewed. Exploratory factor analysis was attempted to assess the factor structure. Further, the performance of items and total scale were analyzed using the item response theory approach. ResultsThe psychosocial adaptation instrument showed excellent validity of individual items (I-CVI range: 0.75 to 1.00) and good Kappa (Kappa range: 0.71 to 1.00). The Kuder-Richardson coefficient for the 50 items was (KR20 = 0.851) suggesting that the items have good internal consistency. The test-retest reliability ICC estimate of single measures was 0.916 (95% CI: 0.796, 0.959). Three items were removed as the discrimination parameters were found to be less than one in the item response theory analysis. ConclusionThe developed instrument is valid and has acceptable test-retest reliability. This instrument could pave a new way of quantifying the psychosocial adaption strategies that are widely used by people living in a disaster-prone area.