The aim of the present study was to provide evidence of validity of the Brief Resilient Coping Scale for use in Spanish young population. A total of 365 university students responded to the Spanish version of the BRCS as well as to other tools for measuring personal perceived competence, life satisfaction, depression, anxiety, negative and positive affect, and coping strategies. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the unidimensional structure of the scale. Internal consistency reliability and temporal stability through Cronbach’s alpha and test-retest correlations, respectively, were comparable to those found in the initial validation of the tool. The BRCS showed positive and significant correlations with personal perceived competence, optimism, life satisfaction, positive affect (p < .01), and some coping strategies (p < .05). Significant negative correlations were observed with depression, anxiety and negative affect. (p < .01). Multiple regression analysis with stepwise method showed that positive affect, negative affect, optimism and problem solving explained 41.8% of the variance of the BRCS (p < .001). The Spanish adaptation of the BRCS in a young population is satisfactory and comparable to those of the original version and with the Spanish version adapted in an elderly population. This supports its validity as a tool for the assessment of resilient coping tendencies in young people who speak Spanish and offers researchers and professionals interested in this area of study a simple tool for assessing it.

A series of silicon thin films was made by very high frequency plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (VHF PECVD) at substrate temperatures below 100 °C at different hydrogen to silane dilution ratios. The electronic properties of these layers were studied as a function of the surface crystalline fraction as determined accurately from a combination of microscope images at different length scales (gathered by using different types of microscopes). The results show that the electrical conductivity increases monotonously as a function of crystalline surface coverage and no discontinuity is observed at the percolation threshold. An increase in conductivity of four orders of magnitude for layers with a high crystalline content is observed after annealing at temperatures up to 170 °C. Combined with the information that oxygen is incorporated at Si-H surface bond sites, this suggests that doping of the intergrain boundaries by oxygen might be dominantly responsible for the electronic properties of mixed phase silicon.

Charge transport in hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (µc-Si:H) is determined by structure on several size scales: i) local atomic arrangement (<1 nm), ii) crystalline grains and their boundaries (1-10 nm), iii) grain aggregates or columns (0.1-1 µm) and finally iv) features comparable to layer thickness (0.1-10 µm). We first summarize our experimental results concerning these effects: differences of conductivities of grains and amorphous tissue measured locally by conductive AFM, transport anisotropy observed by comparing dark conductivity and ambipolar diffusion length parallel and perpendicular to the substrate, and finally thickness dependence of transport parameters (e.g. dark conductivity activation energy and prefactor). Most of these phenomena can be described by using a novel model of the µc-Si:H growth leading to a structure known as Voronoi adjacency network. The model is based on the nearest neighbor constrained growth. To our knowledge, the Voronoi structure is the first structural model able to predict structure and transport properties of the µc-Si:H and it may become a basis for the future predictive model of µc-Si:H based solar cells.