National Resilience: A New Self-Report Assessment Scale.

Abstract

The current paper presents a new self-report national resilience assessment scale (NRAS). The scale was constructed and validated using a sample of 1022 Jewish Israeli adults. The internal structure of the 25-item was determined by a Varimax factor analysis, which emitted four distinct factors pertaining to identifying with the state, solidarity and social justice, trust in national institutions and trust in public justice; which explained 61% of the variance. These factor scores were validated against two national resilience promoting factors (community resilience and sense of coherence), and two national resilience suppressing factors (distress symptoms and sense of danger); as well as four demographic characteristics (level of religiosity, political attitudes, income and level of exposure to terror/ war experiences in the last year). Results supported the validity of the NRAS and its four components, showing that it was consistently correlated with resilience promoting and resilience suppressing factors.