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

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.