Rapid technological and social change has left young people facing a world that researchers describe as increasingly unpredictable. A team in Indonesia has built a new questionnaire to measure the personal resources that help Generation Z cope with that uncertainty.
The study, published in The Open Psychology Journal, was led by Dr Wiwik Juwarini Prihastiwi of the Faculty of Psychology at Muhammadiyah University of Surabaya. It introduces the Adaptive Capital Scale, known as AdCap.
The researchers describe today’s world using two labels. The first, VUCA, stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, while the newer BANI describes conditions that are brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
Many theories describe the qualities people need in such times, but the authors say there have been few tested tools for measuring them among young Indonesians. They set out to fill that gap.
Nine psychology experts first took part in a structured consensus process, known as the Delphi method, to agree on what adaptive capital should include. They settled on four dimensions: toughness, innovativeness, independence, and wisdom.
An initial pool of 60 questions was then checked by six psychologists and measurement specialists. The questionnaire was tested on 1,010 undergraduate students, 793 women and 237 men, to see whether the items held together as intended.
The final version kept 14 items on toughness, 11 on innovativeness, 10 on independence, and 12 on wisdom. All four dimensions were strongly linked to the overall adaptive capital score, and reliability values fell in an acceptable range.
Toughness emerged as the strongest contributor to adaptive capital. The authors suggest that innovativeness, independence, and wisdom add to this by supporting creativity, autonomy, and ethical reflection.
The authors define toughness through resilience, self-determination, and perseverance, and innovativeness through exploration, action orientation, and courage. Independence covers self-confidence, a sense of choice, and not depending on others, while wisdom includes thinking beyond the present moment, social decision-making, socio-emotional awareness, reflection, and self-understanding.
The study has some limits. It relied on self-report, so some students may have given socially desirable answers. Several measures of convergent validity fell below the usual threshold, which the authors say calls for replication with larger and more varied samples, and dimensions such as independence may carry different meanings in other cultures.
Even so, the authors describe AdCap as a culturally relevant and practical tool for strengthening Generation Z’s adaptability. They say future studies should test whether scores predict how young people actually cope.
The authors say the scale may help universities design and evaluate programmes that promote self-reliance, creativity, and reflective wisdom. In organisations, it could inform leadership development and workforce resilience among early-career professionals.
For a generation growing up amid constant change, the research suggests that adaptability can be broken down into skills that may be measured and, in time, developed.
