Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version (ARM-R)

Abstract

The Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version (ARM-R) is an adapted and culturally validated psychometric questionnaire designed to assess resilience from an explicitly socio-ecological perspective among adult populations. Rooted in the foundational framework developed by the Resilience Research Centre and the original English revised instrument by Jefferies et al. (2018), this Indonesian adaptation by Wedyaswari et al. (2024) measures an individual’s psychological capacity to navigate toward health-sustaining resources and negotiate for these resources within their immediate social ecology. While the standard revised instrument comprises 17 items, the Indonesian adaptation integrates an essential 18th item reflecting religiosity and spirituality, capturing an indispensable cultural coping mechanism in Indonesian society. Evaluated among adults aged 18 years and older across diverse developmental cohorts, the scale captures four distinct yet interrelated dimensions: Personal Resources, Ecology Resources: Family, Ecology Resources: Friends and Community, and Opportunity and Meaning. Psychometric investigations reveal exceptional internal consistency, demonstrated by a Cronbach’s alpha of .906 and a McDonald’s hierarchical omega (ωh) of .909. Confirmatory factor analysis robustly corroborates the four-factor structural validity (χ²/df = 1.37, p < .001; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] = .031, 90% CI [.019, .042]; Standardized Root Mean Square Residual [SRMR] = .063; Comparative Fit Index [CFI] = .992). The scale also demonstrates strong convergent validity with existing resilience measures, negative associations with adverse childhood experiences, and significant incremental validity in predicting subjective life satisfaction beyond rugged individualistic traits.

Keywords

Adult Resilience, Socio-Ecological Resilience, ARM-R, Cross-Cultural Adaptation, Indonesian Psychometrics, Protective Factors, Relational Resilience, Religiosity in Resilience, Personal Resources, Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Authors

The psychometric adaptation and empirical validation of the Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version was conducted by an international team of behavioral science researchers specializing in psychometrics, cross-cultural psychology, and socio-ecological systemic adaptation:

• Miryam Wedyaswari: Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Padjadjaran, Jatinangor, Indonesia. Specializes in social-ecological resilience, psychometrics, and community well-being.
• Philip Jefferies: Resilience Research Centre (RRC), Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Leading psychometrician and co-developer of the original revised Adult Resilience Measure (ARM-R) and the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-R).
• Surya Cahyadi: Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Padjadjaran, Jatinangor, Indonesia. Expert in psychological assessment, developmental trajectories, and advanced structural equation modeling.
• Zahrotur Rusyda Hinduan: Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Padjadjaran, Jatinangor, Indonesia. Senior researcher in clinical psychology, psychosocial adjustment, and organizational behavior within collectivist settings.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version (ARM-R) is to provide a culturally calibrated, psychometrically sound instrument that conceptualizes and measures resilience as an interactive, socio-ecological process rather than merely a static intrapsychic trait. For decades, mainstream psychological assessment disproportionately focused on "rugged resilience"—individualized traits such as internal grit, emotional hardiness, cognitive flexibility, and self-mastery. However, cross-cultural empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that in non-Western, collectivistic, and resource-constrained environments, psychological thriving in the face of acute or chronic adversity depends heavily on the systemic availability, accessibility, and cultural meaningfulness of external protective ecologies.

In clinical practice, the Indonesian ARM-R serves as a diagnostic screening instrument to evaluate not only the internal psychological coping strengths of adult clients but also their functional relational integration. Practitioners utilizing this instrument can identify systemic structural vulnerabilities, such as alienation from family networks, low peer support, or perceived institutional marginalization. In psychological interventions, differentiating personal capacities from socio-ecological deficits prevents the misattribution of psychological distress entirely to personal weakness, allowing clinicians to design multi-tiered interventions that incorporate family psychoeducation, community resource mobilization, and spiritual counseling.

In community, epidemiological, and public health research, the scale is designed to quantify community resilience and monitor psychological recovery following collective trauma. Given Indonesia’s geographic location along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," the population faces recurring exposure to natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis), along with systemic socioeconomic stressors. The ARM-R enables non-governmental organizations, humanitarian workers, and social scientists to evaluate whether post-disaster interventions adequately reinforce the protective ecologies surrounding affected individuals. Furthermore, the inclusion of cultural and spiritual coping items allows researchers to investigate how shared cultural identity and religious practices buffer the long-term sequelae of childhood adversity, socio-economic marginalization, and psychological distress.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Indonesian ARM-R is socio-ecological resilience in adulthood. Rather than viewing resilience purely as an internal trait, this model defines resilience as the capacity of an individual to navigate toward the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain well-being, coupled with the capacity of the individual’s physical, familial, and community environments to provide those resources in culturally meaningful ways. The instrument decomposes this overarching construct into four distinct dimensions:

1. Personal Resources

This subscale assesses an individual’s internal cognitive, emotional, and behavioral competencies to cope with hardship, solve complex life dilemmas, and regulate impulses during crisis situations. It reflects personal self-efficacy, determination, and constructive problem-solving skills that do not rely on maladaptive or destructive behaviors. Representative behaviors include the ability to pursue tasks to completion, knowing where to locate institutional or interpersonal assistance when personal coping thresholds are exceeded, and solving problems without turning to violence or substance use. Within the Indonesian context, personal resources also encapsulate the capacity to seek help without experiencing debilitating loss of personal or familial dignity (*harga diri*).

2. Ecology Resources: Family

The family ecology subscale operationalizes the structural, emotional, and logistical support derived from the primary kinship unit. In collectivist societies like Indonesia, the family constitutes the foundational social safety net. This dimension measures psychological belongingness within the family unit, the emotional warmth and genuine interest family members demonstrate regarding each other’s life trajectories, and the unconditional loyalty shown during times of acute adversity. It captures whether the individual feels shielded, validated, and actively preserved by familial bonds when confronting external socioeconomic or psychological stressors.

3. Ecology Resources: Friends and Community

This dimension expands the relational lens to assess external socio-ecological layers, encompassing friendships, peer networks, and the wider neighborhood or community context. It evaluates whether the respondent has dependable social capital outside the family that offers safety, mutual respect, and reciprocal crisis support. Furthermore, this subscale captures experiences of social justice and equity, specifically assessing whether individuals feel protected, treated fairly, and free from discrimination or marginalization in their immediate communal and neighborhood environments. In Indonesia, this mirrors the indigenous concept of gotong royong (communal mutual cooperation and solidarity).

4. Opportunity and Meaning

The fourth dimension captures systemic opportunities for self-actualization, future-oriented agency, and existential purpose. It assesses whether society affords the individual viable pathways to demonstrate adult responsibility, acquire market-valued skills, and engage in meaningful vocational or educational training. In the Indonesian adaptation, this factor deeply incorporates cultural pride and religious commitment. It measures the individual’s psychological connection to their ethnic traditions and societal citizenship, as well as the existential resilience derived from spirituality. The added spiritual dimension evaluates the extent to which religious faith (*keimanan*) provides internal fortitude, moral anchoring, and existential coherence when navigating severe adversity.

Theoretical Framework

The Adult Resilience Measure-Revised is grounded theoretically in the Social-Ecological Model of Resilience, articulated extensively by Michael Ungar and colleagues at the Resilience Research Centre. This paradigm shifts the fundamental locus of resilience research away from isolated neurobiological or intrapsychic mechanisms toward the dynamic transaction between the individual and their multi-layered social ecology. Ungar’s theory integrates Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems Theory, which posits that human psychological development is fundamentally nested within interacting ecosystems: the microsystem (family, close peers), the mesosystem (interactions between microsystems), the exosystem (community environments, public structures), and the macrosystem (cultural values, religious ideologies, societal norms).

Within this framework, resilience is explicitly defined by two reciprocal processes:

• Navigation: The functional agency of an individual to actively seek out and access external resources that sustain mental, social, and emotional health under conditions of acute or chronic adversity.
• Negotiation: The transactional capacity of the individual, their family, and community to communicate, advocate, and ensure that these essential resources are delivered in ways that are culturally consonant and personally meaningful.

The theoretical necessity for an Indonesian adaptation emerges from the cultural limitations of Western resilience paradigms. Traditional resilience instruments, such as the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) or the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), frequently measure resilience as an autonomous, individualistic attribute characterized by self-reliance, emotional invulnerability, and unilateral determination. However, in non-Western, collectivistic contexts, human functioning is interdependent. An individual’s psychological capacity to withstand stress cannot be disaggregated from the resilience of their familial network, communal cohesion, or spiritual faith. By expanding the revised instrument to incorporate religiosity—a central pillar of the Indonesian national ethos (*Pancasila*)—the Indonesian ARM-R operationalizes a more comprehensive, culturally grounded socio-ecological theory where spirituality acts as an externalized macrosystemic and internalized microsystemic buffer against psychological decompensation.

Validity

The psychometric evaluation of the Indonesian Adult Resilience Measure-Revised demonstrates comprehensive construct, content, criterion, convergent, and incremental validity, confirming its clinical and empirical integrity:

Content Validity

During the cross-cultural adaptation process, the instrument underwent rigorous translation and back-translation protocols following International Test Commission (ITC) guidelines. A multidisciplinary expert panel of clinical psychologists, psychometricians, and cultural experts assessed the conceptual equivalence, linguistic clarity, and cultural relevance of each item. Content validation yielded an Item-Level Content Validity Index (I-CVI) average of 3.3 across assessed operational dimensions, demonstrating that the adaptation process successfully aligned the construct of socio-ecological resilience with Indonesian cultural realities, justifying the addition of an 18th item capturing religious and spiritual coping.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

Convergent validity was established by comparing scores on the Indonesian ARM-R with validated measures of individual and systemic resilience administered simultaneously to adult samples. The ARM-R exhibited robust, statistically significant positive correlations with:

• The Rugged Resilience Measure–Indonesian Version: r = .672, p < .001, verifying that while the ARM-R captures broader relational resources, it remains strongly tethered to core coping attributes.
• The Indonesian Resilience Scale: r = .665, p < .001, providing empirical confirmation of construct convergence with established domestic scales.

Predictive and Discriminant Validity

Criterion-related predictive validity was corroborated through historical and psychological adversity markers. The ARM-R demonstrated a statistically significant negative correlation with self-reported childhood adversity (r = ‒.338, p < .001). This confirms the theoretical postulate that severe developmental trauma undermines the subsequent acquisition and mobilization of social-ecological resources in adulthood, while also highlighting the protective buffering role of the ARM-R against cumulative lifetime trauma.

Incremental Validity

To demonstrate that socio-ecological resilience explains psychological outcomes beyond purely intrapsychic traits, Wedyaswari et al. (2024) conducted stepwise hierarchical multiple regression analyses predicting adult life satisfaction (assessed via the Satisfaction with Life Scale). After controlling for demographic covariates and rugged personal resilience in initial steps, the inclusion of the ARM-R significantly increased explained variance (ΔR²), demonstrating that relational, communal, and spiritual resilience dimensions provide unique predictive power in explaining psychological flourishing that individualistic measures fail to capture.

Reliability

The reliability parameters of the Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version meet the highest standards of psychometric evaluation, demonstrating high precision and minimal measurement error across adult populations:

Internal Consistency

The complete 18-item scale demonstrates exceptional global internal consistency:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): The scale achieved an overall coefficient of α = .906, indicating strong interrelatedness among items without redundant collinearity.
• McDonald’s Hierarchical Omega (ωh): Because Cronbach’s alpha can provide biased estimates when assumptions of tau-equivalence are violated, McDonald’s omega was calculated. The scale achieved an ωh = .909, confirming that the vast majority of variance in the composite score is attributable to the general resilience construct.

Across the four individual subscales (Personal Resources, Ecology Resources: Family, Ecology Resources: Friends and Community, and Opportunity and Meaning), alpha coefficients and composite reliability (CR) values consistently exceed the standard psychometric cutoff of .70, confirming the internal consistency of both the total score and the respective subscale scores.

Factor Analysis

The structural validity of the Indonesian ARM-R was determined through a rigorous two-stage factor-analytic framework involving both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across stratified adult participant samples:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial exploratory factor extraction utilizing principal axis factoring with oblique rotation yielded a clean four-factor solution with eigenvalues exceeding Kaiser’s criterion (> 1.0). The four factors collectively accounted for 60.74% of the total variance. Factor loadings for all 18 items were strong, with primary loadings spanning from .51 to .84, and cross-loadings remained well below acceptable psychometric thresholds (< .30). Item 18 ("Keyakinan agama atau spiritualitas memberi saya kekuatan dalam menghadapi kesulitan hidup") loaded cleanly onto the Opportunity and Meaning factor, supporting its theoretical role in existential coping.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To confirm this structure, a second sample was examined using Confirmatory Factor Analysis with maximum likelihood estimation. The hypothesized four-factor model demonstrated an outstanding fit to the empirical data across all key global fit indices, confirming the structural multidimensionality of the scale:

• Normed Chi-Square (χ²/df): 1.37 (p < .001), indicating minimal model strain well beneath the conservative cutoff of 2.0.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .992, significantly outperforming the conventional .95 benchmark for superior fit.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .031 (90% Confidence Interval: [.019, .042]), indicating low approximation error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .063, comfortably beneath the standard .08 threshold for acceptable model fit.

All standardized factor loadings in the confirmed structural equation model were statistically significant (p < .001), validating the construct validity of the 18 items within the four-factor socio-ecological framework.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version (ARM-R)
• Original Authors: Philip Jefferies, Nora McGarrigle, and Michael Ungar (2018)
• Indonesian Adaptation Authors: Miryam Wedyaswari, Philip Jefferies, Surya Cahyadi, and Zahrotur Rusyda Hinduan (2024)
• Construct Assessed: Socio-ecological resilience (Personal, Familial, Communal, and Existential/Spiritual Resources)
• Administration Mode: Self-administered questionnaire; available in electronic (computer-assisted, online survey platforms) and paper-and-pencil formats
• Target Population: Adults aged 18 years and older (inclusive of emerging adults, middle-aged adults, and elderly populations)
• Time Required: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes
• Number of Items: 18 items
• Subscale Structure (4 Factors):
  • Personal Resources: Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
  • Ecology Resources: Family: Items 7, 8, 9
  • Ecology Resources: Friends and Community: Items 6, 10, 11, 12, 13
  • Opportunity and Meaning: Items 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Sangat Tidak Menggambarkan Diri Saya (Not at all like me)
  • 2 = Tidak Menggambarkan Diri Saya (Not much like me)
  • 3 = Cukup Menggambarkan Diri Saya (Somewhat like me)
  • 4 = Menggambarkan Diri Saya (Quite a bit like me)
  • 5 = Sangat Menggambarkan Diri Saya (A lot like me)
• Scoring Guidelines:
  • All 18 items are positively keyed (no reverse-scored items).
  • Scores on each item range from 1 to 5.
  • Subscale Scores: Computed by calculating the sum or mean of the items comprising that specific factor.
  • Total Resilience Score: Computed by summing all 18 items (theoretical range: 18 to 90), or calculating an overall average mean score (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0).
  • Higher scores uniformly indicate greater levels of personal coping capacity and richer socio-ecological support resources.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Adult Resilience Measure-Revised–Indonesian Version was formally validated and published in 2024. The instrument is classified as a non-commercial, open-access psychometric inventory for academic, research, and non-profit clinical evaluation purposes.

In accordance with the operational ethos of the Resilience Research Centre (RRC) at Dalhousie University, the scale can be utilized without license fees by academic scholars, humanitarian agencies, and registered healthcare clinicians, provided that appropriate bibliographic attribution is accorded to the original developers (Jefferies et al., 2018) and the Indonesian adaptation team (Wedyaswari et al., 2024). Commercial deployment, modification, inclusion within proprietary software platforms, or commercial test battery integration requires formal written authorization from the primary authors and the Resilience Research Centre.

References

• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
• Jefferies, P., McGarrigle, L., & Ungar, M. (2018). The CYRM-R: A revised measure of social-ecological resilience for children and youth. Social Indicators Research, 145(2), 701–724. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1899-7
• Ungar, M. (2011). The social ecology of resilience: Addressing contextual and cultural ambiguity of a nascent construct. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.2010.01067.x
• Ungar, M. (2018). Systemic resilience: New frontiers in how we conceive, measure, and facilitate adaptive processes. Ecology and Society, 23(4), Article 34. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10385-230434
• Wedyaswari, M., Jefferies, P., Cahyadi, S., & Hinduan, Z. R. (2024). Measuring psycho-social-ecological resilience: Validation in an Indonesian population. TPM-Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, 31(1), 59–80. https://doi.org/10.36253/tpm31.1.59-80

Items of the Scale