Brief Religious COPE (RCOPE)

Brief Religious COPE (RCOPE)

Brief RCOPE

Pargament‚ Smith‚ Koenig‚ & Perez‚ 1997‚ 1998‚ 1999

 

The following items deal with ways you coped with the negative event in your life. There are many ways to try to deal with problems. These items ask what you did to cope with this negative event. Obviously different people deal with things in different ways‚ but we are interested in how you tried to deal with it. Each item says something about a particular way of coping. We want to know to what extent you did what the item says. How much or how frequently. Don’t answer on the basis of what worked or not – just whether or not you did it. Use these response choices. Try to rate each item separately in your mind from the others. Make your answers as true FOR YOU as you can. Circle the answer that best applies to you.

1 – not at all

2- somewhat

3= quite a hit

4= a great deal

  1. Looked for a stronger connection with God.
  2.         Sought God’s love and care.
  3.         Sought help from God in letting go of my anger.
  4.         Tried to put my plans into action together with God.
  5. Tried to see how God might be trying to strengthen me in this situation.
  6.         Asked forgiveness for my sins.
  7.         Focused on religion to stop worrying about my problems
  8.         Wondered whether God had abandoned me.
  9. Felt punished by God for my lack of devotion.
  10. Wondered what I did far God to punish me.
  11. Questioned God’s love for me.
  12. Wondered whether my church had abandoned me.
  13. Decided the devil made this happen.
  14. Questioned the power of God.

Scale Development

The first step in the development the Brief RCOPE was to factor analyze the full

RCOPE (Pargament‚ Koenig‚ & Perez‚ in press). The RCOPE is a comprehensive‚ functionally oriented measure of religious coping that contains 21 subscales‚ each consisting of five items (105 items total). Subjects indicate the extent to which they use particular religious methods of coping with a negative event on a four-point Likert scale ranging from 0 “not at all” to 3 “a great deal.” Because it was hypothesized that most of the items from the different subscales could be classified as either positive or negative‚ an exploratory factor analysis was conducted using principal factors extraction and oblimin rotation with the solution constrained to generate only two factors. A solution was obtained using this approach with the two factors accounting for 38% of the variance.

Examination of item content revealed that the two factors did appear to measure positive and negative patterns of religious coping. Secondly‚ a subset of seven items were se‎lected from each of the two factors according to several criteria including: items with the largest factor loadings‚ items that loaded clearly on only one factor‚ items from a variety of subscales‚ and the need for economy in measurement.

The Scales

The scale consists of seven positive coping items and seven negative coping items. Positive items were generated from seven different subscales from the original RCOPE: spiritual connection‚ seeking spiritual support‚ religious forgiveness‚ collaborative religious coping‚ benevolent religious reappraisal‚ religious purification‚ and religious focus. The seven negative items originate from five different subscales: spiritual discontent‚ punishing God reappraisal‚ interpersonal religious discontent‚ demonic reappraisal‚ and reappraisal of God’s power.

Pargament‚ K. I.‚ Smith‚ B. W.‚ Koenig‚ H. G.‚ & Perez‚ L. (1998‚ December). Patterns of positive and negative religious coping with major life stressors. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion‚ 37(4)‚ 710-724. Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

 

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jmmh/10381607.0006.104/-‎-initial-development-of-the-iranian-religious-coping-scale?rgn=main;view=fulltext

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