The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale

Abstract

The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) provides an example of an assessment tool developed in a research environment with a specific purpose of assessing improvements over and above symptom reduction in patients with PTSD associated with drug treatment. The item selection appears to have had a good theoretical basis. As the result of factor instability in equivalent but nonrepresentative samples, items were reduced from 25 to 10. It was acknowledged that the instability of factor structure might have been related to insufficient numbers of items covering various aspects of the original construct and that the reduction was guided by statistical rather than theoretical principles. It has been suggestion however, that factor structure differences would be expected in studies of groups that varied culturally and demographically. It is possible that factor analyses of samples that have been systematically selected to represent specific populations would render more structural stability within populations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)