Abstract
There is an ongoing debate in the field of resilience, as to what extent personality is involved in resilience. The Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA) is a resilience scale designed to capture resilience factors in three domains, namely individual dispositions, family cohesion and external social support outside the family. The present study explores the content of the RSA, with regard to possible construct overlap with personality. In addition RSA and a measure of the Five-Factor Model of personality (FFM) are compared with regard to their ability to account for variance in health related quality of life. The study is conducted in a population with spinal cord injuries (SCI) and multi traumas (MT). The aims of the study is to explore whether RSA accounts for variance in health related quality of life beyond FFM personality, whether RSA grasp social and external support factors involved in resilience, and whether RSA is a suitable measure for use in a population with severe physical injuries. Methods: Data is collected in a follow up study, as part of a research project at Sunnaas Rehabilitation hospital (SHR). The data was collected by psychologists at SHR. All 75 patients in this study had SCI and/or MT. Measures of FFM personality (NEO-FFI), RSA and health related quality of life (SF-36) were administered four years after the patients were discharged from SHR, while a measure of dispositional optimism (LOT-R) was administered at admission to SHR. Thus the design of the study is predominantly cross-sectional. Exploration of construct overlap between RSA and personality were done by inspecting the semantic content of the items constituting the scales. Results: Inspection of item content of the RSA variables reveal that several RSA variables may predominantly measure well-established personality concepts such as FFM personality, optimism, self efficacy and locus of control, as underlying constructs. RSA perception of self and RSA perception of future were the variables from RSA accounting for most variance in health related quality of life. Inspection of item content of RSA perception of self suggested this variable may largely reflect FFM neuroticism. Items of RSA perception of future may possibly tap into personality constructs such as optimism, self-efficacy and locus of control. Thus, in the present study RSA did not seem to capture resilience factors related to family cohesion or external social support. Even so, RSA did account for health related quality of life beyond FFM personality. However incremental validity of RSA beyond FFM personality was largely due to RSA perception of future. Thus, results from the present study could challenge the uniqueness of the resilience construct as conceptualized by RSA, with regard to RSA resembling personality.