Essay On Optimism And Resilience

This empirical study involves the constructs of optimism and resilience and aims to measure the effect of optimism in life on an individual’s resilience levels. Optimism being the independent variable is operationalized as the positive or negative view that one has towards life events while resilience being the dependent variable, is operationalized as the extent one would persist in the face of failure. Optimism (independent variable) would be subjected to manipulation of 2 levels, optimistic and pessimistic, through the usage of a computer-based questionnaire, to evoke positive and negative perspectives of life respectively. Participants would be randomly assigned to one of the conditions, with each member having equal chances to be assigned

The results of the measurements would then be compared between participants from the “optimism” group and those from the “pessimism” group to identify the cause-effect relationship of optimism (independent variable) and resilience (dependent variable).

The behavioural task aims to measure situation-induced resilience, with the hypothesis that participants, who were manipulated in the “pessimism” condition, would be less resilient, and hence acquire lower scores for the number of attempts and time spent on the task. However, this instrument has low construct validity. This is due to loose operationalization, whereby the instrument lacks the ability to measure what it is supposed to measure. Thus, the tightness of match between the theoretical definition of the construct and the operationalization is adversely affected. It is difficult, once the results of each participant are collated, to draw a clear defining line between the scores that are considered as representative of high resilience and low resilience respectively. For instance, if a participant is able to succeed in the task in his first few attempts, the