Open AccessDeveloping a Culturally Relevant Measure of Resilience for War-Affected Adolescents in Eastern Ukraine
Author(s) -
Sergiy Bogdanov,
Andriy Girnyk,
Vira Chernobrovkina,
Volodymyr Chernobrovkin,
A. G. Vinogradov,
Kateryna Harbar,
Yuliya Kovalevskaya,
Oksana Basenko,
Iryna Ivaniuk,
Kimberly Hook,
Michael G. Wessells
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal on education in emergencies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2518-6833
DOI - 10.33682/wxrd-x8fq
Subject(s) - optimism , structural equation modeling , psychosocial , psychological resilience , confirmatory factor analysis , psychology , resilience (materials science) , social support , exploratory factor analysis , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , psychometrics , social psychology , psychotherapist , statistics , mathematics , physics , thermodynamics
Psychosocial support in education that is provided during emergencies frequently aims to support children's resilience, but strong, contextual measures of resilience are in short supply in Eastern Europe. In this article, our aim is to describe the development and psychometric properties of the first measure of resilience for war-affected adolescents in Eastern Ukraine. We used qualitative methods to identify the main cultural characteristics of resiliency and then used these constructs to develop the measure. We used exploratory structural equation modeling to extract five factors that showed high internal consistency: family support (ω=0.89), optimism (ω=0.87), persistence (ω=0.87), health (ω=0.86), and social networking (ω=0.87). Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that a concise model of resiliency fit the data almost as well as the exploratory structural equation modeling model. The measure demonstrated good test-retest reliability. In this article, we also discuss the importance of development, validation, and the use of culturally relevant measures of resilience for strengthening psychosocial support programs in schools, particularly in Ukraine.