Doctoral students’ resilience and coping strategies: scale development and exploratory survey using Rasch analysis

The doctoral journey often presents students with a variety of stressors that can create obstacles to progress and may affect the students’ timely completion. In some instances, dropping out altogether may become an unavoidable consequence. How can these stumbling blocks be readily and timely detected so that students can be proactively supported to restore optimal engagement in their feelings, study behaviours and actions? This study aimed to develop and validate a rating scale on doctoral students’ resilience in dealing with study-related adversity (The Doctoral Resilience Scale: DoRS-42) using Rasch models. The scale was piloted with 59 doctoral social science students. The 42 scale response options were operationalised as three sub-scales (Perseverance, Reflecting and Adaptive Help-Seeking, Emotional Response) which were previously found to have good psychometric properties in measuring the resilience of undergraduate students. The study’s purpose was two-fold: Firstly, it aimed to ascertain key psychometric properties of the scale (person/item fit and reliability, dimensionality, disordering and differential item functioning) for different groups of participants in relation to gender, study status, background and year of study. Second, the linear person measures that were produced for each respondent for each of the three scales following the Rasch analysis were then used to conduct parametric statistical analyses. Through a series of independent-samples t-tests, a significant difference was found between international and non-international students for all three sub-scales. The findings are discussed in terms of the potential of the scale to offer useful diagnostic information on students’ levels of resilience.