Under pressure
How you hold up when a plan breaks, a job drags or someone pushes back.
- Questions
- 32
- 5 min
- Hardiness and the four Cs
What this is
Original items on the public hardiness construct (Kobasa, 1979) and the four Cs of mental toughness that grew out of it (Clough, Earle and Sewell, 2002), half of them reverse-keyed. None of MTQ48's items are used. Public-domain IPIP scales for self-efficacy, vulnerability, assertiveness and industry could be substituted as data if you want wording with published reliability.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedHardiness and the four Cs
Kobasa (1979) described hardiness as commitment, control and challenge; Clough, Earle and Sewell (2002) added confidence to make the four Cs. Independent studies have not confirmed the four-way split cleanly, and MTQ48's items are not used.
Written for this app
- Reliability
- not measured
- Factor structure
- not measured
- Validity
- not measured
Further reading
- Kobasa, S. C. (1979). Stressful life events, personality, and health: An inquiry into hardiness (opens in a new tab). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 1–11original source
- Clough, P., Earle, K., & Sewell, D. (2002). Mental toughness: The concept and its measurement (opens in a new tab). In I. Cockerill (Ed.), Solutions in sport psychology (pp. 32–43). London: Thomson Learningoriginal source
- Gucciardi, D. F., Hanton, S., & Mallett, C. J. (2012). Progressing measurement in mental toughness: A case example of the Mental Toughness Questionnaire 48 (opens in a new tab). Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 1(3), 194–214critique
- Kawabata, M., Pavey, T. G., & Coulter, T. J. (2021). Evolving the validity of a mental toughness measure: Refined versions of the Mental Toughness Questionnaire-48 (opens in a new tab). Stress and Health, 37(2), 378–391critique
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.