Psychometric properties of the Quiet Ego Scale (iQES) within the Italian cultural context

Resilience may be viewed as a measure of stress coping ability and, as such, could be an important target of treatment in anxiety, depression, and stress reactions. We describe a new rating scale to assess resilience. The Connor-Davidson Resilience scale (CD-RISC) comprises of 25 items, each rated on a 5-point scale (0-4), with higher scores reflecting greater resilience. The scale was administered to subjects in the following groups: community sample, primary care outpatients, general psychiatric outpatients, clinical trial of generalized anxiety disorder, and two clinical trials of PTSD. The reliability, validity, and factor analytic structure of the scale were evaluated, and reference scores for study samples were calculated. Sensitivity to treatment effects was examined in subjects from the PTSD clinical trials. The scale demonstrated good psychometric properties and factor analysis yielded five factors. A repeated measures ANOVA showed that an increase in CD-RISC score was associated with greater improvement during treatment. Improvement in CD-RISC score was noted in proportion to overall clinical global improvement, with greatest increase noted in subjects with the highest global improvement and deterioration in CD-RISC score in those with minimal or no global improvement. The CD-RISC has sound psychometric properties and distinguishes between those with greater and lesser resilience. The scale demonstrates that resilience is modifiable and can improve with treatment, with greater improvement corresponding to higher levels of global improvement. Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Analogous to checklists of recommendations such as the CONSORT statement (for randomized trials), or the QUORUM statement (for systematic reviews), which are designed to ensure the quality of reports in the medical literature, a checklist of recommendations for authors is being presented by the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) in an effort to ensure complete descriptions of Web-based surveys. Papers on Web-based surveys reported according to the CHERRIES statement will give readers a better understanding of the sample (self-)selection and its possible differences from a “representative” sample. It is hoped that author adherence to the checklist will increase the usefulness of such reports.