2.4.3. Brief Resilience Scale

The Brief Resilience Scale (BRS; Smith et al., 2008) is a 6‐item self‐report questionnaire, which uses a 5‐point Likert‐type scale, ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. Participants were asked to choose one of these options while answering the questions. Examples of items on the BRS scale include: ‘It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event’, and ‘I tend to take a long time to get over set‐backs in my life’. The calculation was done by taking an average of scores for all 6 items, where items 2, 4 and 6 are reversed scores. For example, if a participant scored a ‘6’, he/she was given a ‘2’. Research has found strong theoretical construct validity as well as internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from 0.80 to 0.91, as well as good test–retest reliability, convergent validity and divergent validity of the BRS (Agnes, 2005; Ahern et al., 2006; Smith et al., 2008). Other studies have shown internal consistency of the BRS with Cronbach's alpha coefficients of 0.71 (Fung, 2020) and 0.78 (Soer et al., 2019). The BRS offers a summary score of characteristics that support positive adaptation, as well as increase the possibility of resilience. Moreover, the BRS supports the notion that assessing people's ability to recover is more pertinent than assessing their ability to resist illness, especially when they are already mentally or physically ill (Smith et al., 2008).

The present study found a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.65 for the BRS and subscale reliabilities ranging from 0.55 to 0.68. Although a value higher than 0.70 would be ideal, a value of internal consistency close to 0.60 is satisfactory (Souza et al., 2017). The value of the Cronbach's alpha coefficient is influenced by the number of items, and thus, the fact that the BRS has only six items may have reduced the internal consistency. Furthermore, the item validity test was carried out using Spearman's rank method. The results showed that all Spearman's correlations have p‐values smaller than 2.2 × 10⁻¹⁶, p < .05, which confirms valid items.