Single Versus Multiple Resilience Factors: An Investigation of the Dimensionality of the Academic Resilience Scale

The Academic Resilience Scale (ARS) was developed to measure resilience factors in educational contexts. However, there is no clarity on whether the scale could be used as a measure of unidimensional academic resilience scores or just to obtain multidimensional academic resilience factors. How a scale is scored can affect the validity of inferences based on scores obtained by using the scale in research and practice. This study uses confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and ancillary bifactor measures to examine the dimensionality of the scale. There was no sufficient support for using the scale to obtain unidimensional academic resilience score. Rather, the scale should only be considered as a measure of multiple dimensions of academic resilience factors.