Developing a Culturally Relevant Measure of Resilience for War-Affected Adolescents in Eastern Ukraine

Abstract

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.

Factor structure of academic resilience among Polish and Ukrainian students involved in remote education caused by Covid-19 and military aggression

“…As for the relationship between resilience and cultural background, similar conclusions are proposed by Bogdanov et al (2021). These authors point to the need for contextual, culturally relevant measures of resilience for war-affected adolescents in Eastern Ukraine what is in short supply in Eastern Europe 31 . The authors point out that in the case of Ukrainian adolescents, the process of cultural adaptation as well as strength and difficulties as the resilience components should be taken into account 32 , 33 .…”

Psychological Service for Ukrainian School Students during the Russian Invasion: Experience of School Psychologists from Kryvyi Rih

“…Not surprisingly, this situation affected both the psychological conditions of citizens who remained in the city (in particular pre-schoolers and school students) and the functioning of the municipal services (including the psychological services in every school that remained open [11,12]). The findings of Ukrainian researchers showed a significant role of psychological interventions in reducing traumatic stress among school students in the regions close to occupied territory [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Moreover, following E. Werner [7], school-based interventions and support mitigated the influence of stress.…”