| Summary: | The initial plan of the research team was to study the effects of the two wars with Iraq upon the mental health of Kuwaitis. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, but was driven out in February of 1991. (Al-Hammadi and Al-Abdul Razaaq, 1994). The invasion has left a lasting impression upon the minds of Kuwaitis old enough to remember, and serves as a collective or national trauma. This study was part of an international program of research focusing on national trauma. Kuwaiti reaction was compared with those of New Yorkers' and the rest of the U.S. to 9-11 (Boscarino, Adams, and Figley, 2003), including chaplains (Roberts, Weaver, Flannelly and Figley, 2003) and social workers (Boscarino, Figley and Adams, 2004). The goal of the research was to build a predictive model of national traumatic reactions and recovery that could be useful in subsequent national traumas. Settling on the dependent variable of Raha, our team turned to the tasks of creating a valid, reliable, and usable scale to help answer our primary research question: What is the current state of wellbeing (Raha) among Kuwaitis and what are the primary factors that facilitate and inhibit Raha (wellbeing)? We were aware of the challenges to questionnaire construction and the need, ultimately, to produce a Raha Scale that would overcome the validity challenges. In other words, the extent to which our scale actually measures Raha with both internal validity (questions are asked clearly and logically from the point of view of Kuwaitis) and external validity to allow us to generalize our findings to all Kuwaitis. At the same time we knew that our sample needed to be representative of the culture as much as possible. More than 930 Kuwatis, including students, citizens, friends, and colleagues, assisted in the construction of the current Raha Scale that is both brief (29 items) and sound psychometrically. The Scale has good content validity, since there was an exhaustive effort to represent all of the facets of Raha. The Scale has useful subscales that reflect the Kuwaiti culture, especially the Religious Subscale, and h high internal reliability (Chronbach Alpha is .908 for the entire Scale and a range of. 709 to .851 for the four subscales). We believe that we have reached all our goals so far regarding the development of an indigenous measure of wellbeing that will serve as a good dependent variable for our study of Kuwaiti wellbeing in the shadows of major traumatic events. Ongoing research will help estimate the construct validity by comparing the Raha scale to a measure of established measures of wellness and mental health.
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