Translation, Adaptation, and Validation on Romanian Population of Cope Questionnaire for Coping Mechanisms Analysis

ABSTRACTThe purpose of the present study was to validate the Romanian version of the 60 item COPE Questionnaire (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989), which includes 15 coping strategies. The adaptation of COPE was conducted on a nonprobabilistic, non-clinic, convenience sample of 1009 participants. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the factorial structure of the COPE, on litereature-based hypothetisized models. The results support a solution with four correlated factors, as most appropriate to describe the structure of the Romanian version for the COPE. These four factors are: problem focused coping, emotion focused coping, social support focused coping, and avoidant coping. Supplimentary, for both four-factor solutions, and the initial 15-scales internal consistency coefficients were computed. The internal consistency values range between . 72 to . 84 for the 4-factor solution, and between . 48 and . 92 for the 15 initial scales.KEYWORDS: coping, COPE, confirmatory factorial analysis, reliability, construct validityThe introduction of the concept of coping in medicine and psychology is strongly related to stress (Lazarus, 1966; Selye, 1976; 1976a). The normal or pathological reaction to stress depends on the coping capacities of an individual, as a way to adapt to the stressful context. The interest for coping strategies has registered a continuous growth. For instance, the PsycInfo database has registered 3392 articles between 1990 and 1996 having coping as a descriptor (Ionescu, Jacquet, & Lhote, 2002). Dispite the enormous number of studies on stress and coping in the last two decades, there is no unitary theoretical approach regarding coping. Firstly, coping is usually separated from coping resources (e.g., self-efficacy, optimism), which is very difficult to disentangle. Secondly, there is no unitary theroretical framework of coping, although there is a growing tendency to categorize specific coping dimensions into two main classes. These are seen either as instrumental (problembased), coping and palliative (emotion-based) coping (Zeidner & Endler, 1996), or as engagement and disengagement coping strategies (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010). Due to the many existing attempts to conceptualize coping, there were a lot of coping instruments developed to measure this psychological construct. One such example is Folkman and Lazarus (1988) Ways of Coping Questionnaire, which consists in a series of affirmations, on how people handle problems in stressful situations, differentiating between two coping mechanisms (problem focused coping and emotions focused coping). Another measure is the Strategic Approach to Coping Scale (SACS) developed by Hobfoll, Dunahoo, Ben-Porath, & Monier, 1994; Hobfoll, Dunahoo, Monnier, Hulsizer, & Johnson, 1998), which has been recently validated on the Romanian population (Budau, Ciuca, Miclea, & Albu, 2011). Similarly, if we consider defense mechanisms as coping mechanisms, another existing instrument for measuring coping is the Defensive Style Questionnaire (DSQ-60), developed by Thygesen, Drapeau, Trijsburg, Lecours, and de Roten (2008), which also have been recently adapted on the Romanian population (Cra.ovan & Maricu.oiu, 2012). In the present study, our aim was to contribute to the adaptation and validation process on the Romanian population of another coping instrument, the COPE, developed by Carver et al. (1989), as a 60-item questionnaire, destined to measure 15 different coping strategies. We selected to adapt the COPE questionnaire, firstly, because it is among the most often used coping scales (Hasking & Oei, 2002), and developed by one of the most important authors in the field (see the review on coping made by Carver and Connor-Smith, 2010). Secondly, despite its use on the Romanian population (e.g., Glaveanu, 2012), the COPE has a long history of problematic psychometric properties, mainly in terms of its difficult replicable factorial structure on various populations. …