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Youth Resilience to Violent Extremism: Development and Validation of the BRAVE Measure

ABSTRACT Building resilience to violent extremism has featured in preventing violent extremism efforts for over a decade. Validated and standardized cross-cultural measures can help identify protective capacities and vulnerabilities toward violent extremism for young people. Because drivers for violent extremism are multi-factorial, a measure of resilience cannot be used to predict who will and will not commit acts of terror. Instead, its purpose is to track the multiple forms of capital available to youth at risk of adopting violence to resolve ideological, religious and political grievances, and to use this data to inform interventions that increase young people’s capacity to resist violent extremism’s push and pull forces. In this study, we developed such a measure, using data from 200 Australian and 275 Canadian participants aged eighteen to thirty years old. Following exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, a fourteen-item measure emerged consisting of five factors: cultural identity and connectedness; bridging capital; linking capital; violence-related behaviors, and violence-related beliefs. The Building Resilience against Violent Extremism (BRAVE) measure was found to have good internal reliability (α = .76), correlating in expected directions with related measures. The BRAVE shows promise for helping understand young people’s resilience to violent extremism.