Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test psychometric properties Health-Related Hardiness Scale(HRHS) for Korean elderly. HRHS has been developed by Pollock to measure the effect of hardiness in individuals with actual health problems. Items were generated to measure dimensions based on theoretical definitions of health-related control, commitment, and challenge. In 1990, Pollcok and Duffy revised HRHS to be 34 items. In this study, 34-item HRHS(Pollock & Duffy, 1990) was translated into Korean and administered to 193 elderly involving in 95 hospitalized patients and 98 outpatients or healthy people. The subjects were 80 women and 112 men with an age range of 65 to 95 years(M=71 years) in whom 82.6% classified themselves as moderate or pretty active. Most subjects(80.2%) had education of elementary school or less. The 34-item HRHS consists of three subscales: control, commitment, and challenge, and was measured with 1(strongly disagree) to 6(strongly agree) Likert scale. The higher the score is, the higher people's hardiness. Factor analysis was performed to confirm whether the scale represents three sub-areas as suggested in the literature. Two factors were isolated, using principle components analysis. Two factor solution was accepted for the study since Pollock described the possibility of classifying sub-areas into two divisions. These two factors, commitment/challenge and control accounted for 31.9% of variance of the scale. Factor loadings were string, ranging from .41 to .77. The moderate correlation with task self-efficacy scale also supported the validity(r=.35, p<.05). The scale was found to be internally consistent, showing Cronbanch;s alpha of .90 for the total items with the range of .82 and .90 for three subscales. The findings revealed the potential applicability of HRHS to nursing intervention studies for elderly.