Capturing Resilience in Context: Development and Validation of a Situational Judgment Test of Resilience

ABSTRACT

We developed a 40-item situational judgment test (R-SJT) to capture resilience in context. The scoring key was developed using a crowd-sourcing method (N = 100) and pilot-tested (N = 62). A new sample (N = 208) was used to investigate validity of the R-SJT scores. The R-SJT scores demonstrated acceptable levels of internal consistency, convergent validity, and evidence of better discriminant and criterion-related validity, compared to three Likert-type resilience measures. Scores on the R-SJT moderately correlated with the three resilience scales and personality measures including hardiness, negative affect, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. The R-SJT showed incremental validity beyond traditional resilience measures and personality for criterion measures of psychological adjustment (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress). The R-SJT appears to be a viable instrument to measure resilience.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dylan Reeves, Galo Rodriguez, Andrew White, Ryan Nguyen, and Rachael Pyram for their assistance with this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Even though the R-SJT consistently demonstrated incremental validity beyond the three Likert measures of resilience when predicting outcomes, the Likert measures also demonstrated incremental validity beyond the R-SJT. The three Likert measures together explained additional variance in Depression, Anxiety, and Stress beyond (1) the R-SJT alone, (2) the combination of the R-SJT, hardiness, and affect (i.e., PA and NA), and (3) the combination of the R-SJT and the Big Five. Each Likert measure alone showed inconsistent increments when predicting outcomes. Thus, we do not conclude that the R-SJT can simply replace other resilience measures; the researcher’s choice would depend upon the choice of the dependent variable and the desired increment in R². Please contact the first author to obtain detailed results of these additional analyses.

² ER denotes Emotion Regulation; AD denotes Adaptability; OP denotes Optimism; SE denotes Self-efficacy; SS denotes Social Support.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was obtained to support this project.