Developing a new individual earthquake resilience questionnaire: A reliability and validity test

Abstract

Earthquakes pose serious threats to the world. Good individual resilience can cope with disaster well, but there were few appropriate assessment tools. The purpose of this study was to develop a new individual earthquake resilience questionnaire and test its reliability and validity. First, we built the framework of the individual earthquake resilience questionnaire based on expert interviews. Then, we established the initial version of questionnaire and used the Delphi method and item selection to modify it by qualitative and quantitative methods. Finally, we built the final version of questionnaire (contained 4 dimensions and 17 items) and tested the reliability and validity. The Cronbach’s α values of the four dimensions were between 0.79 and 0.91, the split-half reliabilities were between 0.85 and 0.93, and the test-retest reliabilities were between 0.72 and 0.80. The item content validity indexes were between 0.87–1, and the average questionnaire content validity index was 0.94. The correlation coefficients between each item and dimension with the total questionnaire ranged from 0.79–0.90 and 0.66–0.79, respectively. We used exploratory factor analysis to identify four common factors with a cumulative variance contribution rate of 74.97%. The questionnaire is a valid and reliable tool to measure individual resilience in the context of earthquake disasters.