Development and Validation of the Positive Resources Test(POREST)

Objective: The Main purpose of this study is to develop a questionnaire to measure positive resources. This study has addressed individuals` positive properties from various angles. Having adopted the viewpoints of Seligman (1990) and Keyes (1998), this study has conceptualized individuals` positive properties on the basis of pleasant life, engaged life, meaningful life and social well-being; and classified social well-being into supporting and sharing. Furthermore this study has added other elements which have been proved to be positive resources through a wide range of studies to the scale items in order to lay a foundation for developing the scale to measure positive resources. Methods: This study was conducted in 3 steps. In the first step, this study has examined a wide range of positive elements through literature research. In the second step, we composed a questionnaire of 199 preliminary items based on our positive factors model and carried out a pilot study with 253 Korean adults[males=103, females=150]. We selected 23 items which had shown high correlation with each total score of sub-factors. In the final step, survey data were collected from 514 who are sampled from Korean adults and 6 dimensions were identified by confirmatory factor analysis through principal components analysis and varimax rotation. The questionnaire`s validity was tested by comparing with Hospital Depression-Anxiety Scale (HDAS) and Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) through Pearson correlation coefficient. Results: The results of this study suggest the reliability of this scale is Cronbach alpha = .86. The results of factor analysis suggest the scale composed with six dimensions. The results of the analysis of convergent and discriminative validity suggest there is a positive correlation between this scale and satisfaction with life [r=.57, p <.01]. and a negative correlation between this scale and hospital depression-anxiety scale [r = - .51, p <.01], which suggests the questionnaire`s validity is acceptable.