How to Fail a Scale: Reflections on a Failed Attempt to Assess Resilience.

This article considers resilience, as opposed to suffering, as the subject of a reproducible entity by discussing the failure of an attempt to capture resilience via an internationally reputed scale called the "Resilience Scale for Adults" among cancer patients in urban South Africa. Our effort to utilize the internationally validated scale, and our attempt to draw on ethnographic and interview work to translate this scale to a locally relevant entity failed due to linguistic, cultural, and practical issues. In brief, the attempt failed because our resilience scale was too long, syntactically ambiguous, and culturally inappropriate. We write this article to spur a larger conversation about evaluating resilience from scale to ethnography, and how the concept and measurement of resilience might figure into fields of anthropology and medicine. PMID: 30607874 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Cult Med Psychiatry Source Type: research