In our resilience assessment research, we systematically tested over 100 resilience questions with 617 people. From the tens of thousands of data points, we validated which questions best measure the six domains of resilience and resilience overall.
Why measure?
Areas where we can improve resilience usually sits in blind spots. This means we tend to feel like we are resilient, even though there are areas to work on. Measurement, quite simply, helps to make us aware of where we have opportunities to improve.
Having areas to improve is not a bad thing. After all, we all start from almost zero resilience at birth, then grow from there at our own pace.
Awareness is the crucial step. Once we know where our opportunities are, then we can start building.
Measurement helps to make us aware of where we have opportunities to improve.
The measurement system
Our psychometric scale is called the Predictive 6 Factor Resilience Scale (PR6). The short version of the PR6 that we use with businesses and coaches is 16 questions long. It’s fast, can be done in about three minutes, and provides insight into all six domains to find where to focus attention.
We have a longer version called the PR6-50, which is 50 questions long and is used for research projects, mainly at universities – useful if you want more granularity.
While the PR6-50 has high accuracy, what if you could get a meaningful insight with just two questions?
The PR6 Proxy
While compiling our stats and analysis, we got curious about this idea of two questions as a proxy for resilience. If we could find something like this, then it gives us a fast way to check in with ourselves.
We tested different combinations, mining all the highest correlation questions. Eventually, we found two interesting questions that give us meaningful insight.
These two questions alone predict overall resilience with 76% accuracy, compared to asking 50 questions.
Interestingly, both these questions relate to the Vision domain, which is about your sense of purpose and goals. Here, the questions relate to your ability to self-motivate and your perceptions of your own self-efficacy. We noticed as well from our previous research that the Vision domain also has the highest impact on job satisfaction, so this really is the most important domain of resilience!
Psychologists & Coaches
These questions may be useful in your counselling sessions to slip in and check if someone might be struggling with low resilience. See our new research paper if you’re interested in the science behind all this.