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Keywords

Hardiness, factor analysis, high school students, Lebanon

Disciplines

Architecture | Business | Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences

Abstract

With the emergence of Positive Psychology in 1980, research moved from examining the effect of negative stressors to focusing on the exploration of positive variables that enhance an individual’s ability to face such stressors without the negative impact on their physical and mental health. Further, recent research seeks to study the personality traits which can alleviate the adverse effects of stressful life events. Psychologists have observed that crises and stress often lead to more hardy individuals compared to those who have not been through similar experiences or faced similar stress. Psychological hardiness is, therefore, one of the most prominent variables of mental resistance. This study aims at standardizing a psychological hardiness scale, while verifying its psychometric characteristics and factorial structure, among a sample of Lebanese adolescents in high-schools. The need for such a study arises from the fact that the relevant literature in Lebanon lacks such psychological scales with good psychometric characteristics in general, and the scarcity of psychological scales that measure the positive aspects in humans in particular. The study is significant in that it provides a measurement tool for hardiness as an important variable which is applicable in the Lebanese society. The tool is also able to measure hardiness accurately, while determining the gender differences, through the sound reliability and validity of the scale. The sample consists of 100 adolescents (50 males and 50 females), selected from the students enrolled at high-schools in Beirut and Saida. The scale developed by “Younkin & Bitz”(1996), translated by “Abdel Latif and Hamadeh” (2002), and standardized by the researcher, was applied. The findings showed that the hypothesis was not validated, and 11 factors were extracted, which covered the items of the scale. No factor of hardiness was extracted.

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