Maternal Resilience Scale (ERESMA)

Abstract

The Maternal Resilience Scale (known in Spanish as the Escala de Resiliencia Materna, or ERESMA) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed to assess the psychological, social, and contextual capacities of mothers facing the chronic stressors associated with raising children with special educational needs, developmental delays, and chronic disabilities. Conceptualized by María Paz Roque Hernández, Guadalupe Acle Tomasini, and Martha García (2009) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the scale addresses the urgent necessity to operationalize maternal adaptation through an ecological-systemic and risk-and-protection framework rather than a strictly pathological deficit model. Comprising 45 self-report items evaluated on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“Never”) to 5 (“Always”), the ERESMA captures six distinct, clinically meaningful dimensions: Self-Determination, Hopelessness, Spiritual Faith, Rejection of Personal Responsibility, Lack of Support from the Partner, and Limited Resources for Meeting Needs. The instrument demonstrates robust psychometric properties across validation samples, displaying an overall internal consistency coefficient of Cronbach’s α = .92, with subscale reliabilities spanning from α = .71 to α = .89. For single mothers or primary female caregivers without an active intimate partner, the inventory features an adaptable 38-item structural configuration that omits the spousal support dimension without compromising theoretical or factorial integrity. This comprehensive psychometric profile details the theoretical architecture, empirical validation, structural equation and exploratory factor models, scoring procedures, and clinical-research utilities of the ERESMA within developmental psychology, special education, and family health interventions.

Keywords

Maternal Resilience Scale, ERESMA, Escala de Resiliencia Materna, family resilience, developmental disabilities, special educational needs, maternal coping, parental stress, psychometrics, caregiver adaptation

Authors

The ERESMA was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of clinical, educational, and developmental psychologists based in Mexico:

• María Paz Roque Hernández, Ph.D. — Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza (FES Zaragoza), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico. Dr. Roque Hernández has led extensive investigations into maternal psychological processes, ecological risk factors, and positive adaptive mechanisms among families navigating developmental, sensory, and intellectual disabilities.
• Guadalupe Acle Tomasini, Ph.D. — Resident Professor and Senior Researcher in Special Education and Child Development, Programa de Maestría y Doctorado en Psicología, Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Dr. Acle Tomasini is recognized internationally for her foundational contributions to resilience theory in educational settings, risk-factor mediation, and ecological models for children with exceptional educational requirements.
• Martha García, M.Sc. — Research Associate, Laboratorio de Educación Especial y Resiliencia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Collaborator in the statistical psychometric standardization and field validation of parent-report screening measures in marginalized urban communities.

Purpose

The diagnosis and long-term care of a child with developmental delays, intellectual disabilities, neurodevelopmental disorders (such as autism spectrum disorder or cerebral palsy), or rare chronic illnesses place extraordinary demands on primary family systems. Cross-cultural demographic data reveal that the overwhelming burden of physical caregiving, therapeutic coordination, and emotional containment falls upon mothers. In historical clinical literature, these mothers were predominantly characterized through deficit-focused paradigms highlighting caregiver burden, clinically elevated depression, marital discord, social isolation, and chronic exhaustion. Although empirical documentation of parental stress remains vital, such models routinely fail to capture why and how a substantial proportion of mothers manage to adapt positively, sustain personal agency, mobilize community assets, and cultivate their children’s educational potential.

The Maternal Resilience Scale (ERESMA) was purposefully engineered to bridge this diagnostic and epistemological divide. Designed specifically for mothers of exceptional children, the scale measures individual psychological fortitude, cognitive appraisals, relational dynamics, and systemic barrier navigation. Its fundamental purpose is threefold:

1. Diagnostic and Clinical Profiling: To serve as a screening and assessment instrument that illuminates both maternal vulnerability markers (e.g., feelings of fatalism, learned helplessness, severe economic scarcity, partner conflict) and protective psychological assets (e.g., proactive problem-solving, spiritual coping, personal agency, perceived family solidarity). This multidimensional mapping allows clinical child psychologists, medical social workers, and pediatric therapists to tailor psychoeducational interventions to the specific structural strengths and deficits of the caregiving mother.
2. Educational and Early Intervention Assessment: In special education systems, successful student advancement heavily relies on maternal engagement. By measuring maternal self-determination and feelings of educational competence, the ERESMA aids multidisciplinary educational teams in identifying mothers at high risk of disengagement or emotional burnout, establishing timely home-school collaborative alliances.
3. Empirical Research and Program Evaluation: The scale delivers an empirically validated, culturally syntonic outcome measure for family support programs, parent training workshops, and maternal empowerment curricula across Latin America and international Hispanic communities. It quantifies programmatic shifts from cognitive helplessness toward resilient, self-determined parenting behaviors.

Psychological Construct

Resilience in maternal caregiving is operationalized within the ERESMA not as a static personality trait, but as a dynamic, transactional, and multidimensional process through which mothers employ internal psychological capacities and mobilize external socio-ecological resources to navigate, adapt to, and overcome the chronic adversity associated with exceptional child rearing. Rather than viewing resilience as the mere absence of distress, the construct encapsulates purposeful competence, proactive adaptation, cognitive flexibility, and the reclamation of meaning in the face of developmental adversity.

The ERESMA deconstructs maternal resilience into six distinct theoretical and empirical dimensions:

1. Self-Determination (Resilience)

Representing the primary positive core of the instrument (comprising 9 items: 1, 11, 14, 17, 24, 30, 33, 42, and 44), Self-Determination reflects maternal agency, purposeful problem solving, persistence, positive expectations for the child’s future, and active family collaboration. It measures a mother’s conviction that her actions directly benefit her child’s developmental trajectory (e.g., Item 11: “What I do for my child with problems helps him/her advance”), her proactive search for medical and educational information (Item 33), and her capacity to derive post-adversity personal growth (Item 30: “I learn from the problems my child has”). It embodies high intrinsic motivation, goal-directed tenacity, and maternal self-efficacy.

2. Hopelessness

The largest subscale (comprising 13 items: 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 20, 23, 28, 32, 36, 40, 43, and 45), Hopelessness operationalizes cognitive surrender, emotional exhaustion, existential distress, perceived parental failure, and developmental pessimism. High scores on these reverse-coded items point to maternal demoralization, characterized by feelings of incompetence in educating the child (Item 4: “I feel that I am failing in the task of educating my child with problems”), pervasive parental anxiety (Item 8), feelings of shame or grief regarding the child’s condition (Item 28), and fear-induced paralysis (Item 40). In resilient mothers, hopelessness is systematically low, allowing space for adaptive functioning.

3. Spiritual Faith

Capturing the powerful sociocultural role of religious and spiritual belief systems in Latin American family contexts (5 items: 5, 22, 26, 29, and 35), Spiritual Faith reflects the utilization of transcendence, prayer, and divine trust as emotional containment mechanisms. It measures how faith acts as an internal stabilizer against cognitive despair (Item 29: “Having faith that my child will improve helps set my mind at rest”) and as a catalyst for renewed daily energy (Item 22: “I get strength from God to continue raising my child with problems”). In the ERESMA model, spiritual coping operates not as passive escapism, but as a primary cognitive-affective reappraisal asset.

4. Rejection of Personal Responsibility

Composed of 5 items (3, 9, 19, 27, and 38), this dimension assesses defensive psychological mechanisms, external locus of control, and externalized scapegoating. Mothers scoring high on these reverse-coded statements tend to attribute their circumstances, failures, and child’s difficulties entirely to external actors (Item 19: “I blame other people for the educational problems that my child has”), abdicate personal agency (Item 3: “Whether I succeed in what I do is mainly up to others”), or evade accountability (Item 9). Low scores reflect mature personal accountability and internal control orientations.

5. Lack of Support from the Partner

Representing interpersonal microsystemic strain (7 items: 6, 10, 16, 21, 34, 39, and 41), this subscale evaluates spousal invalidation, marital conflict regarding therapeutic decisions, emotional desertion, and paternal active obstruction (Item 16: “My partner gets annoyed with me for spending time on my child with problems”; Item 39: “My partner discourages me from continuing to care for my child with problems”). In maternal resilience models, the presence or absence of a cooperative, emotionally attuned partner serves as a profound mediator of caregiver coping capacity.

6. Limited Resources for Meeting Needs

Encompassing structural and socio-economic vulnerabilities (6 items: 7, 13, 18, 25, 31, and 37), this subscale measures the tangible socioeconomic barriers that impede optimal child rehabilitation. It taps into financial deprivation restricting educational access (Item 7), poverty preventing medical attendance (Item 18), systemic medical navigation barriers (Item 37), and broader kinship isolation (Item 31). Resilient adaptation requires navigating these tangible deficits through community support and institutional resource mobilization.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the ERESMA synthesizes three foundational paradigms in psychological and family science: Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman’s Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, and Froma Walsh’s Family Resilience Framework.

1. Bioecological Systems Perspective

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model posits that human development and psychological functioning cannot be evaluated in isolation from the nested contextual environments in which individuals operate. In formulating the ERESMA, Roque Hernández, Acle Tomasini, and García conceptualized the mother not merely as an individual caregiver, but as an active node within intersecting systems:

• Microsystem: Direct, dyadic interactions between mother and child, and between mother and partner (captured by the Self-Determination and Lack of Support from the Partner subscales).
• Mesosystem: The active connections between the primary household and external micro-settings, including special education schools, speech therapy centers, and medical rehabilitation clinics (reflected in maternal efforts to coordinate educational goals and obtain medical care).
• Exosystem and Macrosystem: Broader community networks, structural socioeconomic safety nets, healthcare accessibility, and overarching cultural values regarding maternal duty, religious devotion, and disability stigma (captured in Limited Resources for Meeting Needs and Spiritual Faith).

2. Cognitive Appraisal and Transactional Coping

Rooted in Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional framework, the ERESMA evaluates maternal stress as a product of continuous cognitive appraisal. When faced with the chronic stressor of a child’s developmental disability, the mother undergoes primary appraisal (evaluating the degree of threat, loss, or challenge represented by the disability, reflected in the Hopelessness dimension) and secondary appraisal (evaluating available internal and external coping options, measured via Self-Determination, Spiritual Faith, and partner support). Coping strategies oscillate between problem-focused actions (active information seeking, persistence in securing healthcare) and emotion-focused reappraisal (spiritual peace, cognitive acceptance), contrasting sharply with maladaptive externalization (rejection of personal responsibility).

3. Family Resilience Architecture

Drawing on Froma Walsh’s systemic resilience model, the ERESMA acknowledges that adversity impacts the entire family unit, which in turn acts as a collective shock absorber. Resilient families exhibit clear organizational patterns, open communication, shared spiritual belief systems, and collaborative problem solving. The ERESMA operationalizes these principles at the maternal interface, treating the mother as a pivotal systemic anchor whose psychological resilience preserves sibling welfare (avoiding neglect of other children, Item 45) and fosters unified family efforts toward child progress (Item 42).

Validity

The psychometric validation of the ERESMA was conducted by Roque Hernández, Acle Tomasini, and García (2009) through a sequence of rigorous empirical investigations involving mothers of children with diverse special educational needs (including intellectual disabilities, language and hearing impairments, visual limitations, neuromotor dysfunctions, and severe learning disorders) enrolled in specialized and mainstream integration schools in Mexico.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was established through systematic qualitative and quantitative phases. Initially, item generation was derived from extensive qualitative interviews with mothers, clinical focus groups, and expert reviews by child development specialists to ensure strong content and ecological validity. The resultant item pool underwent psychometric screening to confirm semantic clarity, cultural congruence, and discriminatory capacity across extreme criterion groups (comparison of the top and bottom 25% scoring quartiles using Student’s t-tests, confirming that every retained item significantly discriminated between high- and low-resilience caregivers, p < .001).

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent and discriminant validity profiles were examined through intercorrelations among the six subscales and against external psychosocial markers:

• Convergent Inter-factor Associations: Self-Determination demonstrated significant positive correlations with Spiritual Faith (r ≈ .38 to .46, p < .01), supporting the hypothesis that internal agency and spiritual coping mutually reinforce maternal positive adaptation. Conversely, Self-Determination exhibited robust, statistically significant negative correlations with Hopelessness (r ≈ -.54, p < .001) and Rejection of Personal Responsibility (r ≈ -.42, p < .001).
• Discriminant Validity: Subscale correlation matrices confirmed that while dimensions were theoretically and statistically related, inter-factor correlations did not exceed multicollinearity thresholds (all r < .60), demonstrating that dimensions such as Limited Resources for Meeting Needs capture structural-economic realities distinct from pure psychological Hopelessness.
• Criterion-Related Validity: In subsequent empirical applications (Roque, 2012; Acle et al.), mothers scoring high on overall ERESMA resilience exhibited significantly lower levels of clinically verified parental depression (measured via the Beck Depression Inventory) and lower parental burnout scores. Furthermore, their children showed statistically higher rates of school attendance, greater therapeutic adherence, and superior gains in adaptive functional behavior compared to children of mothers characterized by elevated helplessness and low partner support.

Reliability

The ERESMA displays high internal consistency across diverse clinical and community cohorts. In the primary psychometric validation study published in the Revista Iberoamericana de Diagnóstico y Evaluación Psicológica (Roque et al., 2009), the instrument achieved an overall scale Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .92 for the full 45-item inventory. When utilized in its 38-item configuration for single mothers (omitting the partner support factor), total internal consistency remained exceptionally strong (α = .90).

Subscale reliability analysis yielded the following Cronbach’s alpha coefficients:

• Total Scale: α = .92
• Hopelessness (13 items): α = .89
• Self-Determination (Resilience) (9 items): α = .84
• Lack of Support from the Partner (7 items): α = .84
• Limited Resources for Meeting Needs (6 items): α = .80
• Spiritual Faith (5 items): α = .78
• Rejection of Personal Responsibility (5 items): α = .71

These values satisfy established psychometric standards for both group-level research applications (α ≥ .70) and individual clinical diagnostic profiling (α ≥ .80 for core composite indices). Item-total correlation analyses revealed that all 45 individual items demonstrated corrected item-total correlation values exceeding .30, verifying that each item reliably contributes to its designated theoretical subscale without item-redundancy distortions.

Factor Analysis

The internal factorial architecture of the ERESMA was determined through rigorous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed by confirmatory psychometric evaluation in maternal samples. During initial validation, the suitability of the correlation matrix for factor extraction was verified using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy (yielding values > .85) and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity (χ² significant at p < .0001), indicating high matrix factorability.

Factor Extraction and Rotation

Principal Axis Factoring with oblique (Oblimin) and orthogonal (Varimax) rotations was performed. An exploratory six-factor solution emerged clearly based on the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0), scree plot inspection, and theoretical interpretability, accounting for over 52% of the total cumulative variance:

• Factor 1: Hopelessness — Accounted for the largest proportion of individual variance, with dominant item factor loadings ranging from .45 to .78 (notably high on items reflecting parental despair, perceived educational failure, and chronic exhaustion).
• Factor 2: Self-Determination — Loaded cleanly onto positive agency, information-seeking behaviors, and maternal commitment, with standardized factor loadings between .48 and .76.
• Factor 3: Lack of Support from the Partner — Clustered items reflecting spousal avoidance, paternal criticism, and domestic marital friction, showing robust item loadings from .52 to .81.
• Factor 4: Limited Resources for Meeting Needs — Grouped socioeconomic barriers, healthcare transportation deficits, and medical care access challenges, with loadings spanning .44 to .74.
• Factor 5: Spiritual Faith — Grouped all items pertaining to prayer, divine strength, and religious cognitive tranquility, exhibiting strong, cohesive loadings between .56 and .82.
• Factor 6: Rejection of Personal Responsibility — Loaded on statements of externalized blame and passive fatalism, with loadings between .40 and .69.

Structural Fit and Invariance Considerations

Subsequent structural modeling evaluations confirmed that the 6-factor model provided adequate goodness-of-fit indices relative to alternative unidimensional or 3-factor models. Crucially, the factorial configuration accommodates a bifurcated application structure: for single, divorced, or widowed mothers, the elimination of Factor 5 (Lack of Support from the Partner) yields a stable, 5-factor, 38-item structural model that preserves equivalent psychometric properties, factor stability, and construct validity without distorting the remaining dimensions.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Standard Name: Maternal Resilience Scale (ERESMA — Escala de Resiliencia Materna).
• Assessment Type: Structured, multidimensional self-report psychological questionnaire / parent-report rating inventory.
• Primary Target Population: Mothers, female guardians, and primary female caregivers of children with special educational needs, developmental disabilities, chronic health conditions, or neurodevelopmental disorders.
• Total Item Count:
  • 45 items: Standard version for mothers with an active intimate partner/spouse.
  • 38 items: Adapted version for single, widowed, or unpartnered mothers (Factor “Lack of support from the partner” is omitted).
• Item Polarity and Distribution:
  • 14 Positive Items: Items directly reflecting resilience assets, scored in direct order (1 to 5). Items: 1, 5, 11, 14, 17, 22, 24, 26, 29, 30, 33, 35, 42, 44.
  • 31 Negative Items: Items reflecting vulnerability, distress, conflict, or externalization, which must be reverse-coded prior to computing total resilience scores. Items: 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45.
• Response Format: 5-point Likert-type frequency scale:
  • 1 = Never
  • 2 = Almost never
  • 3 = Sometimes
  • 4 = Frequently
  • 5 = Always
• Subscale Item Composition:
  • Self-determination (9 items): 1, 11, 14, 17, 24, 30, 33, 42, 44
  • Hopelessness (13 items): 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 20, 23, 28, 32, 36, 40, 43, 45
  • Spiritual faith (5 items): 5, 22, 26, 29, 35
  • Rejection of personal responsibility (5 items): 3, 9, 19, 27, 38
  • Lack of support from the partner (7 items): 6, 10, 16, 21, 34, 39, 41
  • Limited resources for meeting needs (6 items): 7, 13, 18, 25, 31, 37
• Scoring and Transformation Procedures:
  1. Reverse Coding: For all 31 negative items marked with [R], invert the response values: 1 → 5, 2 → 4, 3 → 3, 4 → 2, and 5 → 1. (Note: in the raw item listing, items 36, 37, 39, and 41 conceptually measure vulnerability/strain and belong to the negative subscales; in standard ERESMA scoring, all items belonging to the Hopelessness, Lack of Partner Support, Rejection of Responsibility, and Limited Resources subscales are inverted so that higher scores consistently reflect greater resilience/protective capacity).
  2. Subscale Scores: Sum the (recoded) numerical values of the items comprising each specific factor.
  3. Total Score: Sum all 45 items (or 38 items for unpartnered mothers). Higher overall numerical scores indicate higher levels of global maternal resilience, proactive adaptation, and systemic protection.
• Administration Modality and Duration: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or interviewer-administered format (recommended for participants with limited literacy); completion time ranges from 15 to 25 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Maternal Resilience Scale (ERESMA) was formally published in 2009 by María Paz Roque Hernández, Guadalupe Acle Tomasini, and Martha García through the Revista Iberoamericana de Diagnóstico y Evaluación Psicológica (RIDEP), followed by further methodological treatises in 2012 under academic compilations on special education resilience. The scale is also cataloged in the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO / OPS) assessment compendium: Latino Families and Youth: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (pp. 40–46).

The ERESMA is an open-access, non-commercial academic assessment instrument. It is free of charge for non-profit scientific research, academic dissertation work, public health screening, and clinical diagnostic practice in educational settings. Formal commercial reprinting, inclusion within proprietary software platforms, or commercial monetization requires written authorization and licensing from the principal investigators and copyright holders at UNAM. Researchers utilizing the instrument in published empirical studies are expected to cite the foundational 2009 validation study and relevant compendium documentation in accordance with standard APA guidelines.

References

• Acle Tomasini, G. (Coord.). (2012). Resiliencia en educación especial: Una experiencia en la escuela regular. Gedisa Editorial. ISBN: 978-84-9784-706-3.
• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2607144
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Pan American Health Organization. (2013). Latino families and youth: A compendium of assessment tools (pp. 40–46). Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization. https://iris.paho.org/handle/10665.2/23171
• Roque Hernández, M. P. (2012). Evaluación de las características de resiliencia materna y mediadores ante la excepcionalidad. En G. Acle Tomasini (Coord.), Resiliencia en educación especial: Una experiencia en la escuela regular (pp. 105–135). Gedisa Editorial.
• Roque Hernández, M. P., Acle Tomasini, G., & García, M. (2009). Escala de resiliencia materna: Un estudio de validación en una muestra de madres con niños especiales [Maternal resilience scale: A validation study in a sample of mothers with exceptional children]. Revista Iberoamericana de Diagnóstico y Evaluación Psicológica, 1(27), 107–132. http://www.aidep.org/03_ridep/2_volumen27.html
• Walsh, F. (2003). Family resilience: A framework for clinical practice. Family Process, 42(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2003.00001.x
• Walsh, F. (2016). Strengthening family resilience (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)