Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Research Article

Demographic Characteristics and Sense of Danger Predicting New Measure of Individual Resilience Following a War

Kimhi S^* and Eshel Y

Department of Psychology, Tel Hai Academic College, Tel Hai, Israel

*Corresponding Author:

Shaul Kimhi
Department of Psychology
Tel Hai Academic College
Tel Hai, Israel
Tel: 972 505 622 070
E-mail: shaul@shamir.org.il

Received date: September 02, 2016; Accepted date: September 23, 2016; Published date: October 05, 2016

Citation: Kimhi S, Eshel Y (2016) Demographic Characteristics and Sense of Danger Predicting New Measure of Individual Resilience Following a War. J Community Med Health Educ 6:472. doi: 10.4172/2161-0711.1000472

Copyright: © 2016 Kimhi S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Four months after Israel's war with the Gaza Strip (2014) we distributed questionnaires to 510 adults: 251 civilians who live in southern Israel and have recently been threatened by massive missile fire, and 259 adults who live in northern Israel, which has not been under missile fire for the last eight years. The current study focuses on two issues: first, a new index to measure individual resilience based on recovery to distress symptoms ratio; second, examining five demographic characteristics and sense of danger as predictors of individual resilience. Path analysis indicated that individual resilience significantly correlated negatively with sense of danger and exposure (β=-0.34), and positively with level of religiosity (β=0.24) and income (β=0.17). Sense of danger mediated the associations between area of living, community size and level of exposure and individual resilience. Results are discussed in terms of the role of demographic characteristics with respect to individual resilience.

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