Adaptation and Validation of the Essential Resilience Scale for Chinese College Students

In the digital-intelligent era, college students are facing increasingly complex psychological pressures, interpersonal adaptation challenges, and risks of covert bullying. As an important protective psychological resource, psychological resilience therefore requires effective measurement tools for assessment. This study aimed to adapt and validate the Essential Resilience Scale (ERS) among Chinese college students, providing a reliable measurement tool for subsequent research on psychological resilience, covert bullying prevention, and dance/movement therapy interventions. The original ERS consists of 15 items across three dimensions: Physical Resilience, Emotional Resilience, and Social Resilience. To enhance its contextual relevance for college students, three items were slightly revised while retaining the original theoretical structure. A total of 561 college students from Shandong Province, China, participated in the study. Overall, 94.1% of the participants were female, 67.0% were aged 20–21 years, and 63.1% were second-year students. A two-phase research design was adopted. In the pilot study, 330 valid responses were collected and used for item analysis and exploratory factor analysis. In the formal study, 231 valid responses were collected and used for confirmatory factor analysis, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and reliability testing. The item analysis results showed that all items demonstrated satisfactory discriminatory power, with CR values ranging from 9.24 to 13.59 and corrected item-total correlations ranging from 0.506 to 0.632. Exploratory factor analysis using principal axis factoring with direct oblimin rotation supported a clear three-factor structure, accounting for 57.720% of the variance, with pattern coefficients ranging from .626 to .824. Confirmatory factor analysis further indicated that the three-factor model fitted the data well, χ²(87) = 90.830, p = .368, χ²/df = 1.044, CFI = .998, TLI = .998, and RMSEA = .014. The scale also demonstrated satisfactory convergent validity, discriminant validity, and internal consistency reliability. Overall, the adapted ERS showed good psychometric properties and can be considered a reliable and valid instrument for assessing psychological resilience among Chinese college students.

Essential Resilience Scale; psychological resilience; college students; scale adaptation

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