Nurses face too much stressors as work-rest cycle problems, overload responsibility, lack of vacation time and painful experiences of patients; therefore, resiliency can help them to appropriate and efficient cope with these stressors. But, there is no brief and practical scale to assess psychological resiliency among nurses in Iran. So, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the multidimensional measure of nurses’ personal resilience.

 

In this methodological study, 120 nurses from Amol’s hospitals were studied using a convenience sampling method who filled the multidimensional measure of nurses’ personal resilience. The multidimensional measure of nurses’ personal resilience is composed of 40 items. The psychometric properties were examined through the Nominal validity, Content Validity, Concurrent validity, Construct validity. The data was analyzed by SPSS 22 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Ill., USA).

Nomianl and content validity were approved by five psychologists. The KMO index and Bartlett's test of sphericity indicated that correlation matrices were suitable for factor analysis. Factor analysis with Principal Component Analysis extracted one factor with 55.21% total variance. Internal consistency was confirmed by a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.86 and there was no change in number of components or dimensions and questions.

 

 

Table 1. Eigenvalue, percentage of variance of factors and compression percentage of expressed variance in factor analysis by principal components

Factor	Eigenvalue	Expressed variance (%)	Expressed compression variance (%)
Determinant	12.88	32.19	32.19
Patience	3.61	9.03	41.22
Compatibility	3.21	8.03	49.25
Recovery	2.38	5.96	55.21

 

Table 2. Rotational factor matrix of a set of 20 questions in the Varimax method

Questions	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Factor n. 1: Determinant	0.47	0.51	0.40	0.39	0.54	0.43	0.46	0.59	0.60	0.49
Questions	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
Factor n. 2: Patience	0.38	0.42	0.48	0.41	0.52	0.39	0.51	0.44	0.38	0.35
Questions	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30
Factor n. 3: Compatibility	0.43	0.39	0.40	0.38	0.57	0.65	0.66	0.39	0.36	0.42
Questions	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40
Factor n. 4: Recovery	0.47	0.35	0.39	0.44	0.49	0.33	0.62	0.38	0.42	0.47

 

 

Table 3. Correlation coefficients and Cronbach's alpha

	Total resilience score	α
Determinant (Qs 1-10)	0.498	0.73
Patience (Qs 11-20)	0.631	0.82
Compatibility (Qs 21-30)	0.588	0.68
Recovery (Qs 31-40)	0.501	0.70
Total resilience score (All Qs)	0.628	0.86

Q=question

 

Table 4. Results of Pearson correlation coefficients of factors with each other and the whole scale

Factor	Factor n. 1	Factor n. 2	Factor n. 3	Factor n. 4
Determinant	1
Patience	0.53	1
Compatibility	0.68	0.72	1
Recovery	0.73	0.66	0.82	1
The total scale	0.69	0.73	0.58	0.6

Figure 1. Multidimensional scale diagram of nurses' personal resilience

 

One of the important issues for specialists in nursing studies is to create appropriate tools for measuring psychological characteristics and interventions to increase their resilience; because nurses are prone to psychological disorders and physical illnesses due to the workplace stresses. According to some researchers, job stress is one of the main factors in reducing productivity in organizations and causing physical and psychological complications in employees, which is still very common among health care workers today [24]. The researchers have also concluded that nursing is one of the most stressful jobs which mostly leads to dissatisfaction and eventually resignation.
In this study it was shown that 51.5% of nurses had moderate stress and 5.9% had severe stress. About 40% had more than average psychological stress and 75.1% of them were dissatisfied with their job. There was also an inverse correlation between psychological stress and job satisfaction [25]; therefore, the study of nurses' personal resilience in clinical and research fields requires a comprehensive and appropriate questionnaire. In addition, cultural harmonization is one of the necessities of examining a psychological tool in different societies. In this regard, not using appropriate and reliable tools is one of the obstacles to proper and accurate review of nurses' resilience, which is also overcome by re-examining the validity and reliability of a scale in the new culture. This issue is even more important when we know that the multidimensional questionnaire of nurses' personal resilience is the only questionnaire that assesses the different dimensions of resilience in the nursing community; therefore, due to the importance of this issue, this questionnaire has been validated.
The aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the multidimensional scale of personal resilience of nurses in the Iranian nursing community. This scale has four subscales of decision making, tolerance, compatibility and recovery. Determining and perseverance is the goal of the nurse and is a cognitive decision for progress and success. Tolerance is conceptualized as the nurse's patience and personal capacity to withstand unpleasant, stressful, and difficult situations without giving up. Compatibility, the ability of the nurse to be flexible and associate, as well as the ability to cope with the stressful and changing environment and self-adjustment to adapt to changing circumstances are considered. Recovery is also considered as physical and mental recovery from previous setbacks and the ability to return to normalcy and the ability to regenerate despite problems.
The validity of the multidimensional scale of nurses' personal resilience in the present study shows the alignment of this study with previous studies [22]. The scale under study has good theoretical and experimental validity based on psychometric criteria and the obtained results are in line with the psychometric properties of most of the researches reported in this field [26-27]. One of the necessities of the present study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the multidimensional scale of personal resilience of nurses in the Iranian nursing community. According to the explanations of resilience and its factors, it can be said that personal resilience is considered as a source to protect people against the problems and harmful effects of workplace hardships.
Resilience is one of the sub-components of the concept of psychological capital that nurses can use to show less vulnerability to stressful events. Numerous comprehensive and review studies have reported that having resilience enables nurses to be more resilient to problems and less affected by daily events. They can also tend to choose challenging tasks and use their efforts and motivational resources to achieve their goals and resist obstacles and problems. Highly resilient nurses are constantly thinking about how to pursue and achieve their goals. They view their past experiences as preparation for the future, and they perform well in various aspects of their lives and consider themselves successful overall. High-resilience nurses can stay motivated, use alternative passages, and not stop when they encounter an obstacle. Nurses with high levels of resilience tend to develop new methods when dealing with problems. They can overcome negative emotional experiences faster and are more likely to experience positive emotions in the midst of their stressful events and activities. When faced with problems and even successes, these people continue on their way with more effort and make great efforts to achieve successes [26-24]. Therefore, examining the psychometric properties of a comprehensive scale to assess the resilience of nurses in various dimensions can pave the way for better services to this group of medical team and improve the provision of medical services and care to patients.

 

This study showed that the multidimensional measure of nurses’ personal resilience had appropriate psychometric properties and is a valid and reliable screening index to measure psychological resiliency of nurses. This index could facilitate the assessing of Well-Being in brief and practical way among nurses.

 

We thank all those who participated in this research and helped us do it. This research was conducted without the financial support of a specific organization or institution.

 

The authors declared no conflict of interest.