Development and psychometric analysis of the 10-item resilience scale specific to cancer: A multidimensional item response theory analysis

Abstract Purpose Resilience is an important concept in the cancer literature and is a salient indicator of cancer survivorship. Classic theory test (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) were performed to develop and validate the 25-item Resilience Scale Specific to Cancer (RS-SC). This study was designed to develop and validate a short form of RS-SC (RS–SC–10) with a multidimensional IRT (MIRT) analysis. Methods MIRT analysis was performed to test two models (three- and five-factor) derived from previous studies and assess the item parameters of RS-SC and RS–SC–10. Results A total of 451 Chinese patients with different cancer diagnoses were analyzed. The three-factor structure showed better goodness of fit compared with the five-factor structure in RS-SC. RS–SC–10 retained 10 items with high discriminative parameters from RS-SC and consisted of two factors, Generic and Shift-Persist. Item information function indicated that RS–SC–10 had the highest discrimination ability among patients with low to moderate levels of resilience. Conclusions MIRT provided useful information on RS-SC and RS–SC–10 by combining the approaches of CTT and IRT. RS–SC–10 showed great potential in clinical settings owing to the low scale of burden on patients. More studies on the Minimum Clinically Important Difference of RS–SC–10 are warranted.