Trial Report Psychometric Properties of the REMAP Resilience Scale in a Norwegian Sample of ME/CFS Patients and Healthy Controls, 2024, Strand

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Psychometric Properties of the REMAP Resilience Scale in a Norwegian Sample of ME/CFS Patients and Healthy Controls
Elin B. Strand
Lise Solberg Nes
Elin Børøsund
Are Hugo Pripp
William Malarkey

and
Toril Dammen
Published Online: April 24, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1027/2698-1866/a000076

Abstract

Abstract:

Being able to increase and know how to strengthen resilience may be relevant for patients living with long-term symptoms such as chronic fatigue syndromes.

The current study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of a Norwegian-translated version of the REMAP resilience measure in a sample of patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy controls.

Factor analyses indicated poor fit for both the one- and five-factor solutions of the translated REMAP measure with best fit for a correlated five-factor model.

Validity proved to be good, while reliability was poor for two of the subscales. Differences were revealed between gender, age groups, and between patients and healthy controls.

The construct validity indicates that REMAP assesses adequate aspects of resilience.

REMAP might be valuable to use to show that resilience resources could be developed in various life domains and aid in coping with chronic illness.

However, REMAP should be further tested in other samples and cultures.
 
This is not an appropriate thing in ME/CFS, it's highly arbitrary and I can't think of a single possible use for it. In fact for many of those questions, answering in the way that is framed as positive resilience would be significant denial of reality.

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This is not an appropriate thing in ME/CFS, it's highly arbitrary and I can't think of a single possible use for it. In fact for many of those questions, answering in the way that is framed as positive resilience would be significant denial of reality.
That list could be summarised, 'are you healthy?' What a ridiculous and inappropriate questionnaire for sick people.

Even for well people, the questions imply judgement about how people should live and behave. I hate the whole resilience movement, as it's usually applied to people in situations where they are being bullied or mistreated in work or home situations. Instead of dealing with the bullies and improving working and living conditions, they expect the downtrodden people to become more 'resilient'.
 
I get the idea that if you are more ‘resilient’ you are in a better position (statistically) to make better choices for yourself. This leaves some leeway for the causation they imply, but this very construct then has to assume some equality of options to choose from for all. So it implodes. The ‘pick and chose’ approach to model assumptions in psychology is really something. As if Boeing decided to assume zero air resistance when engineering planes.

And I t’s just.. Really entertaining to read that it was based on the original Malarkey study. Always hiding in plain sight aren’t they!
 
I get the idea that if you are more ‘resilient’ you are in a better position (statistically) to make better choices for yourself. This leaves some leeway for the causation they imply, but this very construct then has to assume some equality of options to choose from for all. So it implodes. The ‘pick and chose’ approach to model assumptions in psychology is really something.
Absolutely correct.

I think resilience, in the psychological sense, is going to go the way of early self-restraint/delayed gratification studies. Those studies tested something like whether children would choose between one cookie now, or two cookies if they could wait five minutes, and how that related to longer term outcomes in their lives. It was supposedly a measure of some kind of self control, which showed that those who could wait for the two cookies had superior something something psychological, and that this was somehow casually causally related to their life outcomes.

What they failed to control for was economic, and hence food, insecurity of the parents. When somebody finally did it turned out that the kids who didn't wait and took the one cookie straight away were not deficient in self control but were actually acting rationally because they could not rely on the two cookies being available later, so they quite correctly had to take what was available when it was actually available. They had to choose the tangible now over the promised later.

Story of psych research in a nutshell, IMO. The failure to identify and control relevant significant variables (including the underlying assumptions).

I will bet that when resilience studies do use adequate controls they will find that, far from lacking resilience, ME/CFS patients (and many other groups) will in fact show to have very high levels of it. Not because we are special, but simply because we have no choice. We find it somehow, or we die.

The fact that it is not pretty or 'efficient' is irrelevant, and speaks only to how truly shitty the situation is that we are forced to endure, and how limited our resources and choices, including having to somehow survive the endless psycho-pathologisation of our behaviour and choices.
 
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Also as I tend to be the polar opposite of almost every feature of the psychosocial stereotypes, this is yet another one. I'm a stoic by nature, it takes no effort for me to be 'resilient' in its usual meaning (as opposed to whatever is meant by this weird questionnaire, which includes questions about smoking?!). But they always built this out of bit of shredded strawmen. It's always a bit of tendency to be a type A, or a bit of tendency to be neurotic, or a bit tendency to have some beliefs, or a bit of tendency to give up too quickly, or a bit of tendency to have too high personal expectations and ambitions, or a bit of tendency to have no ambitions, or a bit of tendency to have had a rough childhood, and on and on and on.

It could be any and all of those things, and when it's none of those things, well that's why they have the whole varied nonsense about network imbalances, or software/hardware, or whatever, just like they did with depression, to account for all the people who met none of the psychosocial stereotypes they built explanations out of. A fake biological explanation that could be plausible, if it had any evidence for it. But this a discipline that can hold up such an explanation, then some time later mock the idea that anyone ever did so, which most of them did, because they always knew it wasn't true, but if there's any new research hinting at it again they'll all be back having always known it was true.

Malarkey is right on. Not Malarkey, though, just malarkey.
 
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