DOES THE COURAGE MEASURE (CM) MEASURE PERSISTENCE DESPITE FEAR?

The Courage Measure (CM) was created to measure the individual difference of courage, but recent research has suggested that the CM may instead gauge persistence despite fear (PDF). If true, then prior research using the CM would need to be reevaluated. The current article performs two studies. The first study confirms the factor structure of the reduced CM. The second study calculates the heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations of the CM with the PDF dimension of the Multidimensional Persistence Scale (MPS). The results exceed typical cutoffs for HTMT ratios, and the average item intercorrelations of the CM were less than the item cross-correlations of the CM with the PDF dimension. These two results support that the CM and PDF dimension measure the same construct. Future research should integrate prior findings using the CM with PDF, which provides a new and substantial theoretical basis to understand the recently developed construct.