X. Psychological Resources: Resilience- School Resilience Scale

Background

School resilience refers to positive adaptation despite experiences of significant school-related stressors. Subjective school resilience is defined as students’ perceived ability to respond positively to significant stressors, both social and academic, that may affect their school functioning. Review of 24 resilience measurement scales, revealed only three subjective measures of the resilience phenomenon. They are the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS; Smith et al., 2008); Subjective Resilience Questionnaire (SRQ; Alonso- Tapia et al., 2013); and the Academic Buoyancy Scale (ABS; Martin & Marsh, 2006). The SRQ and ABS were the only instruments which were framed and validated specifically to assess subjective resilience in the school setting. They have two key strengths: they frame items in the context of specific risk factors or stressors and include adaptive responses to these stressors. However, they are limited in breadth as they focused only on either social (posed by family, peers, and teachers) or academic-related (e.g., bad marks) stressors. Much of the stress that students experience in school may come from a combination of factors related to academic tasks (Martin & Marsh, 2008) and interactions with different social partners (Bradford, Vaughn, & Barber, 2008). The School Resilience Scale (SRS) serves as a more comprehensive and theoretically grounded measure than existing scales. The SRS addresses some of the limitations of earlier measures of school resilience. As students face stressors related to both academic tasks and social relationships, the framing of items in SRS in relation to both groups of stressors allows users to assess school resilience more accurately and helps to broaden the understanding of resilience situated in the school sphere.

Abstract

Two studies focusing on the development and validation of a new measure of school resilience – the SRS-were conducted: Study 1 involved Grade 8 students (n = 1,159) and Study 2 involved Grade 8 and Grade 9 students (n = 190) in Singapore. The results of both studies suggest that the SRS comprised one second-order factor underpinned by four first-order factors, which correspond to resilience in relation to stressors emanating from academics, family, teachers, and peers. This factor structure was found invariant across gender and Socio-Economic Status (SES). The SRS had satisfactory 2-month and 3-month test–retest reliability. In Study 1, school resilience was found to be a significant positive predictor of the adaptive dimensions of academic motivation but did not serve as a significant predictor of amotivation. In Study 2, school resilience was found to be a positive predictor of academic achievement and life satisfaction but a negative predictor of depressive symptoms. These results held even after controlling for students’ gender and SES, as well as general resilience. The findings demonstrate the potential of SRS as a comprehensive and valid measure of subjective school resilience for adolescents.

Scales and Subscales

Academic factors (5 items); Social-Family factors (3 items); Social-Peer factors (4 items); Social-Teachers factors (4 items).

Funding

This study was funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER 41/12 ISC and OER 28/15 ISC) and administered by the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Reference

Alonso-Tapia, J., Nieto, C., & Ruíz, M. A. (2013). Measuring subjective resilience despite adversity due to family, peers, and teachers. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 16, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/sjp.2013.33

Bradford, K., Vaughn, L. B., & Barber, B. K. (2008). When there is conflict: Interparental conflict, parent-child conflict, and youth problem behaviors. Journal of Family Issues, 29, 780–805.https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X07308043

Cohn, M. A., Frederickson, B. L., Brown, S. L., Mikels, J. A., & Conway, A. M. (2009). Happiness unpacked: Positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building reserves. Emotion, 9, 361–368.

Loh, J. M. I., Schutte, N. S., & Thorteinsson, E. B. (2014). Be happy: The role of resilience between characteristic affect and symptoms of depression. Journal of Happiness Studies, 15,1125–1138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-013-9467-2

Martin, A. J., & Marsh, H. W. (2008). Academic buoyancy: Towards an understanding of students’ everyday academic resilience. Journal of School Psychology, 46, 53–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2007.01.002

Smith, B. W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., & Bernard, J. (2008). The Brief Resilience Scale: Assessing the ability to bounce back. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 15, 194–200.

Citation

Caleon, I. S., & King, R. B. (2020). Examining the Phenomenon of Resilience in Schools: Development, Validation, and Application of the School Resilience Scale. European Journal of Psychological Assessment. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000572