Study Tools

The survey used a self-designed general information questionnaire, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), and the10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10) administered to 374 ED nurses working in 3 women’s and children’s hospitals in Chengdu, China between November 20 and November 27, 2021.

The general information questionnaire was used to collect the respondent’s information about gender, age, marital status, working years, education background, department, nursing hierarchy, professional title, work hours per day, night shifts per month, type of hiring, position (triage level: 1, 2 or 3), work area (fever outpatient area, waiting area/isolation rooms for suspected COVID-19 patients, isolation wards, and other), whether the respondent cared for a patient with suspected or confirmed COVID-19, whether the respondent had rotated to another department since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, whether the respondent voluntarily applied to join the emergency medical team to support Wuhan in the fight against COVID-19, and whether the respondent participated in the fight against COVID-19 in Wuhan.

The Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), developed by Kessler [18], has been fully validated and applied in China [19,20]. Cronbach’s alpha for K10 was 0.92. The K10 was used to evaluate the respondent’s nonspecific psychological distress such as anxiety and depression that the respondent had experienced in the most recent 4-week period. The K10 consisted of 10 items and was unidimensional. The higher the K10 score, the worse the psychological distress. The K10 score, which was the sum of the scores of all items, was 10–50. It was interpreted as: K10 score of 1–15, No psychological distress; K10 of 16–21, Mild psychological distress; K10 score of 22–29, Moderate psychological distress; K10 score of 30–50, Severe psychological distress. Respondent who received the K10 score of 16 or above were considered to experience psychological distress [21].

The 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10), co-developed by Connor and Davidson [22], contained 10 items. Cronbach’s alpha for CD-RISC-10 was 0.85, indicating good reliability and construct validity. The Chinese version of CD-RISC-10, translated and revised by Chinese scholars, was used in this study. Cronbach’s alpha for the Chinese version was 0.92, indicating good psychometric properties, internal consistency, consequential validity, and criterion-related validity [23,24]. It was also applied to nursing students in China [25]. Each of the 10 items was scored on a 5-point Likert scale. The scores ranging from 0 to 4 were assigned to the following responses: ‘never’, ‘seldom’, ‘sometimes’, ‘frequently’, and ‘always’. The CD-RISC-10 score was the sum of the scores of all items. The higher the CD-RISC-10 score, the greater the resilience.