Abstract:

We often encounter stressful and problematic situations in our lives. Even children of early and preschool age can feel and explain that something is wrong, i.e. they are aware of the problem situation so they learn from an early age to cope with unpleasant life events. Overall, an individual's capacity to adequately react to a certain situation without negative consequences for himself regardless of the significantly stressful context is defined as resilience. Resilience can be recognized and developed from early childhood. In a specific way, it protects children in situations of stress and trauma, and it presents an escape and a shield against difficulties and bad feelings. It is extremely important to know the concept of resilience and encourage it in children to achieve their well-being, and have the ability to adequately measure since it allows a systematic and scientific approach to studying one of the most important characteristics of children’s and people’s mental health. However, it should be noted that measuring resilience is not simple, as this concept is very complex and due to that, it is defined differently. For example, resilience can be explained as a socio-ecological construct. The environmental perspective means that when giving children the opportunity to reach situations where they realize their own potential, interventions must involve people such as social workers, nurses, and educators, as well as people who are expected to be supported, such as parents, peers and the community in which children live. From the social perspective, resilience can be defined as the ability of an individual to direct his or her path toward resources that ensure his or her well-being, the ability of an individual to secure those resources, the ability of individuals, their families, and communities to negotiate culturally meaningful ways to share resources. In any case, the social and cultural context in defining and measuring resilience is very important, therefore this paper aimed to run the validation of the CYRM-12, short resilience scale on the Croatian sample of preschool children. N=17 early childhood educators estimated N=269 children on CYRM-12. After obtaining approval for the use of CYRM-12 in Croatia, the scale was back-translated, and after an agreement on cooperation with kindergartens in the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, educators assessed children in their groups. The scale has 12 items and the assessment was performed on a three-point Likert-type scale (1=No, 2=Sometimes, 3=Yes). In the first step, exploratory factor analysis was performed with the Extraction method on Principal component analysis and Varimax rotation, and in the second step confirmatory factor analysis with the same method and rotation. The first-factor analysis resulted in a three-factor solution that explains 58.70% of the total variance. However, based on the expected one-factor structure, confirmatory factor analysis resulted in 38.75% of the total variance explanation. The reliability analysis performed resulted in a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.80. The first item showed the smallest variance and the lowest saturation on the resilience factor, which indicates the possibility of improving the validity of the scale, either in linguistic or in terms of content, which should certainly be taken into account in future research.

Keywords:

CYRM-12, early childhood educators, kindergarten, preschool children, resilience, validity.