When researchers and public health officials attempt to quantify the psychological and mental health impacts of disasters, they inevitably turn to indices and scales. These measurement tools help translate complex emotional landscapes and trauma into structured data, offering a window into how communities weather crises. A recent research effort focused on secondary school students in Indonesia offers a fresh perspective on this challenge, highlighting both the potential and the limitations of trying to measure human resilience.
A paper authored by four Indonesian researchers—titled “Development and validation of the Student Social Resilience Scale for Disasters (SSRD) among adolescents in disaster-prone areas”—was published in the journal BMC Psychology. The study provides a detailed look at how young people conceptualize and experience resilience when faced with environmental and societal shocks, adding to a growing global body of work examining youth mental health in an increasingly unstable world.
Detailing the Research
The study’s sample comprised 800 randomly selected secondary school students ranging in age from 15 to 18 years old. The demographic was carefully balanced by gender and drawn from various regions across Indonesia, a country frequently impacted by geological and climate-related events. These students were administered the Student Social Resilience Scale for Disasters, which comprises 28 distinct statements. Participants were asked to rank each statement using a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5, indicating their level of agreement or alignment with the sentiment.
To ensure the instrument was culturally and contextually appropriate, the statements were thoughtfully adapted and translated into Indonesian, the nation’s official language. For example, the original English-language scale included the statement, "My friends stand by me during difficult times." In the translated and adapted version used for the Indonesian cohort, this became, "My friends are always ready to help and be with me in emergencies." Similarly, the general statement "Spiritual beliefs are a source of strength for me" was tailored to reflect local phrasing and daily realities, becoming "My spiritual beliefs are a source of strength in my daily life and give me the strength to face emergencies."
The primary objective of the study was to validate the Student Social Resilience Scale for Disasters, a milestone the authors successfully achieved. Of particular importance was the deliberate adaptation of the original scale for disaster contexts, demonstrating that such methodological modifications can and should be made to ensure evaluation tools remain genuinely relevant to the specific topic at hand. Furthermore, the research confirmed an essential conceptual truth: true disaster resilience is never solely about the isolated individual, nor is it exclusively a product of the surrounding social situation. Instead, personal traits, community support systems, and broader contextual factors interact in tandem to influence how students cope with and recover from adversity.
Thinking Beyond the Study
The study naturally invites broader questions, such as why the research specifically focuses on "disaster-prone areas," a framing emphasized in the title, abstract, and throughout the paper. While the study’s location in Indonesia certainly exposes its population to numerous natural hazards, this local reality reflects a broader global truth: virtually everywhere is disaster-prone, and disasters happen everywhere.
Interestingly, the paper utilizes the term "natural disasters" without critical interrogation, even though Indonesian disaster researchers have long stood among world leaders in adopting the fundamental axiom from modern disaster science that disasters are never truly natural. Hazards may be natural—such as tectonic shifts or weather patterns—but disasters are fundamentally social, economic, and political outcomes. Any school and any student in the world could be abruptly affected by environmental events. Historical precedents abound, ranging from a volcanic eruption grounding commercial flights across an entire continent, as occurred in Europe in 2010, to severe droughts leading to stringent water restrictions across major metropolitan areas, or massive vegetation fires rendering the air toxic with smoke and particulate matter hundreds of kilometers away.
Moreover, every school in the world was profoundly and simultaneously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2023, along with the sweeping public health measures enacted to manage viral transmission. These interventions included prolonged closures of schools and educational facilities, as well as mandatory isolation periods for students and staff who fell ill. The lasting psychological fallout of these disruptions continues to be documented; a study published last year in the journal Current Psychiatry Reports by two American authors detailed the extensive mental health impacts experienced by United States students upon returning to the physical classroom after prolonged, pandemic-related closures.
The inherent vulnerability of schools everywhere is also tragically demonstrated by acts of targeted violence and mass shootings. Recent years have seen devastating massacres in schools located in places as diverse as the rural town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, Canada, and the bustling capital city of Thailand, Bangkok. These events underscore the grim reality that no geographic location or academic institution appears entirely immune from acute forms of disaster.
Beyond the conceptual framing of vulnerability, methodological challenges inherent in quantitative research must also be addressed. While Likert scales serve a valuable purpose in social science research, their well-documented limitations must be acknowledged and actively overcome. Long-standing difficulties associated with Likert scales include questions regarding the reliability and consistency of respondents, as well as the technical limitations of many statistical procedures when dealing with ordinal data.
Cultural biases can also inadvertently intrude upon survey results. An implicit mathematical construction underlying any Likert scale is the assumption that the psychological distance is uniform between each consecutive choice on the scale. In practice, however, different individuals and distinct cultures may view the distances between each numerical rating quite differently, depending heavily on how the central option—typically presumed to be a neutral midpoint—is interpreted in comparison to more absolute endpoints like 1 and 5.
Lessons From the Study
Despite the inherent complexities of quantitative measurement, no single academic study can cover every facet of a sprawling issue, and this particular research provides vital lessons that can be applied elsewhere. The true value of the paper lies not only in the raw data it generated, but equally in the deliberate process of collecting that data.
First, the authors make an exceptional point by addressing a common pitfall in resilience literature: much prior research examines either purely individual psychological traits or purely community-level dynamics, regardless of how "resilience" is formally defined. The strength of the scale deployed in this Indonesian study is its ability to bridge these domains, bringing individual and social aspects together and contextualizing them within a unified framework.
Second, the detail and specificity of the 28 statements serve an active, participatory function, ensuring that respondents begin critically considering the issues being raised. Whether or not respondents tick the boxes with absolute statistical consistency, simply asking adolescents to contemplate statements such as "I am always open with my family or caregivers about my feelings and concerns" encourages them to reflect on their communication habits. Consequently, they may discover actionable ways to better articulate their feelings and concerns to their families or caregivers, potentially fostering greater emotional openness in their daily lives.
Resilience is ultimately far more than a numerical score calculated by completing a standardized survey. It is a dynamic, ongoing process that brings together individuals, their interpersonal networks, and their broader social and environmental surroundings—precisely as the research out of Indonesia demonstrates.