New 16-Item Scale Measures How Displaced People Mobilize Resources to Survive

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The distinction between resilience as a dispositional trait and resilience as a process of mobilizing resources has become increasingly central to research on forced migration. Traditional instruments such as the Brief Resilience Scale were designed to capture an individual’s capacity to bounce back from adversity, a framing that assumes the primary challenge lies within the person rather than in the environment surrounding them. For displaced populations, however, the most salient stressors are often external: navigating unfamiliar bureaucratic systems, securing legal documentation, accessing healthcare, and negotiating rights that may not be clearly understood or easily claimed. The developers of the Displacement Resource Mobilization Scale argue that these relational and institutional dimensions deserve measurement in their own right, a position grounded in consistent evidence that post-migration difficulties predict psychological distress at least as strongly as exposure to traumatic events does. By building an instrument around resource mobilization rather than dispositional recovery, the scale shifts attention from what a person is to what a person can actually access and use.

The three-factor structure that emerged from the psychometric analysis offers a useful conceptual map for thinking about adaptation after displacement. The first factor, individual adaptive capacity, resembles conventional resilience constructs and captures personal coping resources. The second factor, support seeking and relational resource use, reflects the ability to identify, reach, and draw upon social networks, whether family, friends, or community ties. The third factor, service and rights navigation, is the most novel contribution: it measures the practical competence of engaging with institutions, understanding entitlements, and completing the procedural tasks that displacement imposes. That this dimension emerged independently through both exploratory and confirmatory approaches suggests it is not merely an artifact of item wording but a distinguishable domain of functioning that general resilience measures simply do not touch.

The statistical evidence supporting the scale is strongest in some areas and more cautious in others. Internal consistency estimates for the three factors, expressed as ordinal alpha values between 0.816 and 0.859, fall comfortably within acceptable ranges for research instruments. The correlated three-factor model achieved a comparative fit index of 0.952 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.064 in the internal holdout subsample, figures that meet conventional thresholds for acceptable fit. Equally important is what the bifactor analysis revealed: with explained common variance of 0.496 and hierarchical omega of 0.694, the data did not support collapsing the sixteen items into a single total score. This is a meaningful finding for future users of the scale, because it indicates that the three dimensions carry sufficiently distinct information that averaging across them would obscure more than it reveals. Researchers adopting the instrument should therefore analyze and report the subscales separately rather than relying on an overall summary.

The two-week test-retest stability estimates, ranging from 0.578 to 0.647, fall below the conventional benchmark of 0.70 and warrant careful interpretation. Several considerations are relevant here. Short retest intervals with modest subsample sizes can produce attenuated stability coefficients, and factor scores derived from ordinal models are subject to estimation variability that raw scores are not. Nevertheless, the authors are transparent that this figure does not meet the standard threshold, and they position the scale accordingly: as a research instrument suited primarily to group-level description rather than individual-level assessment or outcome tracking. This honesty about limitations is consistent with contemporary measurement standards, which emphasize that preliminary validation is a stage in an ongoing process rather than a terminal verdict on an instrument’s worth.

Measurement invariance testing adds another layer of confidence to the findings. The absence of scalar invariance violations across the five grouping variables that could be examined suggests that the scale functions comparably across the subgroups tested, meaning that observed group differences in scores are more likely to reflect genuine differences in resource mobilization rather than artifacts of differential item functioning. For a population as heterogeneous as Turkish-literate Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi adults in Istanbul and Ankara, this comparability is not trivial. Displaced communities differ in legal status, length of residence, language proficiency, and access to formal support systems, and an instrument that behaves differently across these groups would produce misleading comparisons.

The cross-sectional associations reported in the study are consistent with theoretical expectations. All three factors correlated positively with dispositional resilience and general self-efficacy, with the strongest association observed for adaptive capacity, the factor conceptually closest to traditional resilience constructs. The weaker but still positive correlations for support seeking and navigation suggest that these dimensions tap something related to but distinct from personal coping disposition. Longer residence in Türkiye and better Turkish comprehension were both associated with higher navigation scores, a pattern that makes intuitive sense: navigating services and claiming rights requires linguistic access and accumulated familiarity with institutional procedures. This finding also hints at the scale’s potential sensitivity to change over time, since language acquisition and institutional familiarity are precisely the kinds of variables that intervention programs and integration policies aim to influence.

The descriptive treatment of perceived stress and depressive symptoms deserves note. The authors report these correlations descriptively because the two comparison measures were almost uncorrelated with each other in the sample, an unexpected pattern that complicates straightforward interpretation of convergent validity. Rather than forcing a narrative onto unstable data, the study presents these results as preliminary observations to be clarified in future research with larger and more representative samples. This restraint reflects a broader principle in scale development: validity evidence accumulates gradually across studies, populations, and time points, and early claims of criterion validity built on anomalous comparison data would be premature.

The methodological architecture of the study merits attention for researchers planning similar work. Splitting the sample into calibration and internal holdout subsamples allowed the factor structure identified in one half of the data to be verified in the other, a form of internal cross-validation that guards against overfitting and capitalizing on chance. The combination of ordinal exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory graph analysis, invariance testing, item response theory, and network psychometrics represents a comprehensive contemporary toolkit, one that goes well beyond the classical approaches that dominated earlier scale development. The use of face-to-face administration with snowball sampling, while pragmatic for reaching a population that is difficult to enumerate, also constrains generalizability, and the authors acknowledge that the sample is non-representative of Turkish-literate displaced adults more broadly.

The development process itself illustrates the value of mixed qualitative and quantitative groundwork. The reduction of an initial theory-derived pool of thirty-six items through a three-round modified Delphi review with eight experts, followed by cognitive interviews with twelve displaced adults, embeds the perspectives of both professional judges and the target population into the instrument’s design. Cognitive interviewing in particular serves a function that statistical item reduction cannot: it reveals whether respondents understand items as intended, whether culturally specific phrasing creates confusion, and whether the lived experience of displacement is faithfully represented in the item content. For instruments intended for vulnerable populations, this step is not optional refinement but essential safeguarding.

Looking forward, the authors identify several priorities that will determine whether the DRMS-16 matures into a widely usable instrument. Item revision may sharpen ambiguous content and improve stability estimates. External replication in independent samples, ideally with probability or quota sampling designs, would test whether the three-factor structure generalizes beyond Istanbul and Ankara. Cross-language validation would extend the scale beyond Turkish-literate respondents, a critical step given that language proficiency itself was associated with navigation scores and may therefore have shaped the sample in substantive ways. Evidence on responsiveness, meaning the scale’s sensitivity to change following interventions or policy shifts, would establish its utility for evaluating programs aimed at improving service access and rights awareness among displaced communities.

The broader significance of this work lies in its reframing of what mental health measurement should capture in displacement contexts. If post-migration difficulties rival trauma exposure as predictors of distress, then instruments that measure only internal coping capacity leave half the picture unmeasured. A scale that treats service navigation and rights claiming as measurable competencies opens the possibility of evaluating integration policies, humanitarian programs, and legal aid services with tools designed for exactly those outcomes. It also provides researchers with a way to test theoretical models in which institutional access functions as a pathway linking policy environments to individual wellbeing. As validation work continues, the DRMS-16 may prove valuable not only as a descriptive instrument but as a bridge between psychometric research and the practical machinery of migration support systems.

Subject of Research: …

Article Title: Resource mobilization under forced migration: development and preliminary internal validation of the Displacement Resource Mobilization Scale (DRMS-16)

Article References: Çınar, Ö., Cengiz, E., Yıldız, E., Yıldız, S., & Tosunoğlu Kusan, B. (2026). Resource mobilization under forced migration: development and preliminary internal validation of the Displacement Resource Mobilization Scale (DRMS-16). BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05807-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05807-5

Keywords: forced migration, refugee mental health, psychometrics, scale development, resource mobilization, resilience, measurement invariance, item response theory, network psychometrics, Turkish refugees, displacement, Resource