Development and validation of the humanitarian aid workers resilience scale (HAWRS)

Background: Humanitarian aid workers experience various challenges in disasters, which affects their wellbeing. Being resilience can help volunteers to adapt to them. This study was conducted to develop and validate a resiliency questionnaire to evaluate the resilience of humanitarian aid workers in disasters. Methods: This study was conducted in 2 phases between Dec 2017 and Oct 2018. In the first phase for item generation, we used qualitative content analysis. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 18 humanitarian aid workers were used for data collection. In the second phase, by conducting a quantitative study, the psychometric properties of the scale including face, content and construct validities as well as internal and external reliabilities, were determined. Data analysis was performed using SPSS 19 and the significance level was set at less than 0.05. Results: Six main subjects were extracted from the first-stage data using content analysis. The final questionnaire included six factors and 31 items after validity and reliability criteria analysis. These six factors including organizational supports, individual factors, organizational planning, social support, teamwork and challenges of disaster scene included 52.19% of the variance. The internal consistency was confirmed as well (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.814). Conclusion: This specific self-assessment questionnaire can be used for scoring the resilience of humanitarian aid workers in disasters. In the case of low resilience score of volunteers, managers should avoid sending them on missions and try to improve their resilience through educational programs.