مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - A Longitudinal Assessment Design for Modeling College Students’ Psychological Resilience

Abstract :

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the usefulness of a longitudinal assessment design in obtaining diagnostically meaningful measurements for affective competencies that show variance over time. Application data were collected as a part of a larger longitudinal study investigating emotional aspects of learning for college students and included weekly self-ratings of 80 students over eight consecutive weeks about how resilient they felt and whether they were experiencing any serious life difficulties at that time. For comparative purposes, the students were also asked to respond to two additional resilience scales, namely, the Brief Resilience and the Connor- Davidson Resilience Scales. The results show that the eight-week longitudinal assessment design was especially useful for describing how the construct of resilience operated differently across individuals and subgroups depending on whether they were going through a challenging life experience. Overall, the findings support the argument that the measurements obtained using a repeated or longitudinal assessment design can be more informative about the nature of the constructs being measured as a process than those obtained using the conventional one-time only assessments. Researchers are recommended to use longitudinal assessment models to improve the accuracy of their findings when assessing affective skills or any other skills that might be prone to intra-person or over-time variance.