Development of Resilience Assessment Scale for Children admitted with Chronic Diseases

Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and psychological development that generally occurs during the entire period. Development of executive functions, or cognitive skills enables the control and coordination of thoughts and behaviour for appropriate functioning. Besides being sick there are certain related factors such as changing the health care team shifts, pain due to various rendering procedures, prolonged parental separation, peer detachment and loosing of self-esteem during the course of hospitalization. It is essential to assess the psychological domain of the adolescents while caring for the physical domain (chronic illness) as treatment modalities improve with psychological well-being. The objective of the study was to develop a scale for assessing resilience among children with chronic diseases. Methodological research approach was used for development of an effective Resilience Assessment Scale for children admitted with chronic diseases. Study was done on 100 children aged 10-18 years admitted with chronic disease in MMIMS& R Hospital, Mullana, Government Civil Hospital at Ambala and Karnal. From previous reviews of literature, experts guidance and investigators personal experience, a list of factors/domains were identified and compared with standardized Resilience scales Modified Delphi technique was used for Content validation of Resilience assessment scale with seven experts Content validity was ascertained by experts opinion and was found to be 0.71. Cronbachs alpha and inter item correlation were used to measure internal consistency of the tool, coefficient alpha was 0.81. The range of rating score was 29-145 with the assumption that higher the scores, the greater the resilience. The recommendations for the future research can be Psychological interventions based on the comparison of resilience by resilience assessment scale by using different standardized scales in order to understand the lacking domains that are responsible for resilience and hence attain the maximum level of health.