Good agreement was found with expected correlates, such as problem behaviour, enhancing the validity of this scale for the assessment of resilience in dogs. This revealed a two-component solution, one reflecting “Adaptability/behavioural flexibility” and the other “Perseverance”, which are in line with two aspects of the human conceptualisation of resilience. An analysis of the structure of the resilience items was performed on those found reliable. Here, 1084 completed responses were returned, and 329 dog owners completed the survey a second time 6–8 weeks later to assess intra-rater reliability. Items covered demographic factors and the presence of problem behaviours, as well as 19 items related to three domains of resilience described in the human literature, which might reflect trait-level resilience in dogs. A survey was developed and distributed online to dog owners. This study examined the validity of this concept in dogs, through the development of a reliable instrument to measure resilience as a trait and a subsequent assessment of its psychometric properties. Dogs are exposed to many stressors and appear to vary in their ability to cope with these, but the concept of resilience (the ability to bounce back after adversity), so important in the human field, has not been specifically studied in this species.
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