title: Reliability and validity of the Italian version of the 14-item Resilience Scale.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  In recent years resilience has gained clinical relevance in sociological, psychological, and medical disciplines, and a lot of scales measuring resilience have been developed and have been utilized in the western countries. The aim of the study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the 14-item Resilience Scale (RS-14), by describing its validity and reliability. As agreed with the authors of the original English version of the RS-14, it was translated into Italian. Then the standard procedure for back-translation was followed.
  
  
  METHODS
  In total, 150 participants among the nursing and professional education students of the University of Insubria of Varese and health workers of the "ASST dei Sette Laghi-Ospedale di Circolo" of Varese were enrolled. The responses to the questionnaires were collected only from the students and the health workers between the ages of 18 and 65 years who gave their consent to participate in the study from April to September 2015. A subsample of 26 students and health workers was retested on the RS-14, 5 weeks after the first assessment. The questionnaires were handed out to 214 people, and 150 sets of questionnaires (70%) were returned, of which eight were subsequently removed because >60% of the answers were missing. In order to ensure anonymity, every completed questionnaire was identified only via a code.
  
  
  RESULTS
  No significant differences were found between the mean values of the resilience scores between women (76.1) and men (76.3), with unpairedt-test = -0.08 andP=0.93. Similarly, no difference between resilience scores were found between mean age group of 18-25 years (75.3) and 26-65 years (78.7), witht-test = 1.6. The overall Cronbach's alpha of the RS-14 is 0.88,P=0.10. The RS-14 is negatively correlated with the Beck Depression Inventory-Primary Care Version and the 12-item General Health Questionnaire and positively correlated with the World Health Organization Quality of Life-Brief Version. The test-retest reliability, assessed on the 26 subjects 5 weeks after the first evaluation, highlighted an intraclass correlation coefficient value equal to 0.65. Factor analysis retains three factors, and it considers the factor loadings >0.40: RS-14-06 ('I am determined') is loaded on all the factors and RS-14-12 ('In an emergency, I am someone people can generally rely on') is not loaded on any factor.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This study demonstrates that the Italian RS-14 has psychometric properties with a good level of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.88), an adequate concurrent validity, verified by relationships with the other scales and as it was expected from literature, and an acceptable test-retest reliability.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine - Psychiatric Division.
authors.forename: Camilla
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Callegari
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Centre for Research EPIMED - Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy.
authors.forename: Lorenza
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bertù
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine - Psychiatric Division.
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lucano
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine - Psychiatric Division.
authors.forename: Marta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ielmini
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine - Psychiatric Division.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Braggio
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine - Psychiatric Division.
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Vender
keywords: adolescence; adulthood; factor analysis; measuring scales; psychometrics; resilience